Butterfly People
Page 55
7. This plate shows many underwing moth species, all drawn and colored by Herman Strecker. The underwings are called such because, when the insects are at rest, their forewings are folded back to cover their hindwings, thereby “converting” them, with their bright colors, into the underwings. The sweetheart underwing (number 15), which Strecker fell in love with as a child, appears on the far left at the bottom of the plate. Published in Strecker’s Lepidoptera (1878).
8. Strecker longed to possess a rare tropical butterfly from southeast Asia after seeing this depiction as a young boy in a grand 1779 catalog, Papillons exotiques by the Dutch butterfly man Pieter Cramer, in the basement library of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. It was the “first bird wing” species ever discovered (in Latin, Ornithoptera priamus), so called because it looked like a bird high up in the trees. Linnaeus named it in 1758, and Cramer drew and colored it, on the basis of a single specimen. Courtesy of Craig Chesek, © American Museum of Natural History.
9. Another tropical species that fascinated Strecker was the giant African swallowtail, Papilio antimachus, the largest butterfly in Africa, with a seven- to nine-inch wingspan. The image here, doubtless seen by Strecker as a boy, was figured by the English naturalist Dru Drury in his Illustrations of Natural History (London, 1770). Drury named the butterfly “antimachus,” after an ancient Macedonian king. Latin and Greek were (and are still today) used as the standard languages of naming, to give all naturalists throughout the world a common way of discussing the same organisms, which often exist in many places at the same time, in defiance of national or local boundaries. Swallowtail species, for instance, can be found nearly everywhere in the world. Courtesy of Craig Chesek, © American Museum of Natural History.
10. This plate of moths was created by Herman Strecker. The insect with the long tails is a moth from Brazil, Eudaemonia jehovah, named by Strecker in 1875. Eudaemonia is Greek for happiness or contentment, and jehovah is the proper name of the God of Israel in the Hebrew Bible. A symptom of the risks many naturalists took with their nomenclature, the name outraged many of Strecker’s friends, especially the religious ones, who thought Strecker had breached conventional standards of decency. Published in Strecker’s Lepidoptera (1878).
11. The plate featuring the common sulphur is from William Henry Edwards’s Butterflies of North America. A Frenchman, Pierre Latreille, first named it Colias philodice, the genus after one of Venus’s many names and the species after the golden maid of honor to Venus. In the 1870s, Henry Edwards observed that “every schoolboy throughout the country knew that the most common species in America was Colias philodice.” William Henry Edwards said of it that “where Philodice is no one can fail to notice it, as it gently flits from flower to flower, or courses along the road or across the meadow, with sustained and wavy flight. It is sociable and inquisitive, and may often be seen to stop in mid-career as it overtakes or meets its fellow, the two fluttering about each other for a moment, then speeding on their way.”
12. Augustus Grote correctly identified more American moth species than anyone in history. This plate contains several underwing moths described by him in his An Illustrated Essay on the Noctuidae of North America (London, 1882).
13. Depicted by Strecker himself in his 1878 Lepidoptera, and perhaps an homage to the time he spent as a very young man alone in Guatemala, Papilio marchandii, the bright, orange-colored swallowtail at the center of the plate, was originally identified and described by the French butterfly man Jean Baptiste Boisduval in 1836.
14. This plate by Strecker contains several moth species known as buck moths (figures 8–14), all belonging to the genus Pseudohazis, in Latin meaning “false” (pseudo) “Syrian god of war” (hazis). The logic of the name is perplexing, although not to Strecker, who described, drew, and colored many of the species. They “may be found,” observed Strecker’s contemporary William Holland, “in vast numbers in the morning hours on bright days in their favorite haunts in the region of the Rocky Mountains. They frequent flowers in company with diurnal lepidoptera, and they may be easily taken. They are characteristic of the country of the sage-brush, and the ranges of the western sheepherder.” Holland, Moth Book (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1903), 93.
15. The butterflies in this wonderful plate by Strecker, from his Lepidopetera: Rhopaloceres et Heteroceres (1878), belong to the family of Lycaenidae, boasting today more than six thousand species in the world, including such subfamilies as the coppers, blues, and hairstreaks. They are all small, often brilliantly colored insects, otherwise known as the “gossamer winged” due to the delicate appearance of their wings.
16. Strecker’s portrait, in his 1878 Lepidoptera, of a multifaceted species belonging to the Sphingidae, a family of robust flying moths, with large bodies, streamlined wings, and tongues usually long enough to reach far into flowers for nectar. Also called sphinx or hawk moths.
17. Drawn by Mary Peart and colored by Lydia Bowen, this plate of the pearl crescent butterfly was the first life history of this common American species ever published, depicting the butterfly, caterpillar, chrysalis, and egg in magnified form.
18. This portrait of the zebra long-wing (or, in Edwards’s preferred Latin, Heliconia charitonia), a semitropical species in Florida belonging to a mostly tropical butterfly genus, was created by Edwards based entirely on specimens sent to him by Annie Wittfield, the young invalid daughter of William Wittfield, a Florida physician.
19. Portrait of butterfly artist Mary Peart by Peart’s niece, Caroline Peart. Note the butterfly at the top of the image. Peart visited cat shows in Philadelphia with William Henry Edwards. Courtesy of Franklin & Marshall College and the Permanent Collections of The Phillips Museum of Art, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
20. One of six plates devoted entirely to the eggs of butterflies in volume 3 of Scudder’s Butterflies of the Eastern United States and Canada, this plate is unique in its whimsically arranged and precisely rendered surface details. But it is special in another way: the biggest egg in the ensemble, number 8 in the top row, comes from one of the smallest butterflies, the White Mountain butterfly. How are we to understand its hulking size, with a magnification of 40:1, except as an expression of the pride Scudder felt in his discovery of the butterfly’s caterpillar on the top of Mount Washington?
21. Several of these images of caterpillars in Scudder’s volume 3 were based on paintings by Mary Peart and by Mary Edgeworth Blatchford, Scudder’s sister-in-law, who tended his household after the death of his wife, Ethelinda. Among the caterpillars are the zebra swallowtail (14), the giant swallowtail (16), the black swallowtail (17), and the pipe vine swallowtail (20).
22. A true-to-life, magnificent portrait of the eastern tiger swallowtail at all stages of development, with caterpillars of several sizes feeding on tulip tree leaves. Nothing like it had ever before been published.
23. Another splendid portrait by Mary Peart and Lydia Bowen, with every feature of the life history of the baltimore checkerspot on display, distinguished by what Edwards called the “webs of phaeton,” a community of caterpillars in a common nest, living on behalf of a common aim. Edwards thought the webs were unique in the butterfly world, but Scudder later showed that they marked the life histories of other species as well.
24. This plate of the spring azure, in volume 2 of Butterflies of North America by William Henry Edwards, reveals a comprehensive mapping of the life history of a favorite butterfly of his; as the earliest butterfly on wing, it always announced the coming of spring, emerging “on the first sunny day of March.” Note especially k or the magnified segments, 11–13, of the blue azure’s caterpillar, which friendly ants visit in the summer, tapping on them, as Edwards observed, “like the thrumming of a piano,” in an attempt to draw forth from m and m2 (the magnified tubes on 12) an irresistible sweet liquid. To ensure that they get the liquid, the ants seem to stand “guard” over and protect the larvae from the dangers of parasitic wasps, an example of a remarkable phenomenon in nature—t
he cooperative or symbiotic relationship of two very different species.
25. Will Doherty caught this silky black butterfly (number 1, in the male form) on the island of Talaud in Malaysia. In 1903, the Canadian naturalist Robert Rippon named it Troides dohertyi, which still stands. Courtesy of Craig Chesek, © American Museum of Natural History.
26. In 1898, Robert Rippon drew and colored Ornithoptera paradisea for his giant catalog, Icones Ornithopterorum, a testimony to the beauty and diversity of tropical butterflies. It was first named by Otto Staudinger in 1891 and then renamed by Rippon Schoenbergia paradisea, an appellation still accepted. The butterfly appears as number 1, in the male form. Courtesy of Craig Chesek, © American Museum of Natural History.
27. This plate displays the forewings and hindwings of three Morpho species, the last, the blue Morpho octavia, a Mexican species. The other two are Morpho justitiae and Morpho grandensis, drawn and colored by Robert Rippon in Biologia Centrali Americana, vol. 3 (London, 1879–1901), a landmark multivolume natural history of the plants and animals of Mexico and Central America, edited by Frederick DuCane Godman and Osbert Salvin of the Natural History Museum, London. Courtesy of Craig Chesek, © American Museum of Natural History.
28 and 29. In an effort to build up his butterfly collection, Herman Strecker mailed countless tropical blue Morpho butterflies to Americans around the country, hoping to inspire the recipients to exchange or to buy and sell butterflies with him. The strategy had its desired effect while at the same time exposing many Americans to the beauty of the natural world. This image of Morpho menelaus, named for the king of Sparta and husband of Helen of Troy, along with the images on plate 29 of two other Morpho species, was drawn and colored by the Austrian Jacob Hübner, one of the most influential nineteenth-century butterfly people, in his Sammlung exotischer Schmetterlinge (Collection of Exotic Butterflies, Augsburg, 1806). These images excited Strecker as a boy. Courtesy of Craig Chesek, © American Museum of Natural History.
30. Compare, for power and effectiveness, plates 30 and 31, one relying entirely on the artistry of Mary Peart, the other on color photography. In 1898 Peart ended her work for William Henry Edwards; she had done both the drawing and the coloring. This plate shows the Rocky Mountain parnassian, caught in the Rockies and found in Edwards’s collection.
31. If Mary Peart showed expertly what could be achieved by the human hand, William Holland’s Butterfly Book of 1898 demonstrated how machines could displace it. This plate, crowned by the beautiful Diana fritillary (1 and 2) and photographed from specimens sold to Holland by William Henry Edwards, relied on the most advanced technology of the nineteenth centruy. For beauty and accuracy, such images challenged at the core the great artisan tradition of the handcrafted that had reached something of a climax in the work of Mary Peart.
32. The Nokomis fritillary, or “daughter of the moon,” named by William Henry Edwards in 1862 after Hiawatha’s grandmother in Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. Drawn by Mary Peart and colored by Lydia Bowen for Edwards’s Butterflies of North America.
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