Scudder might well have followed his older, much-loved brother David, who, enamored of Mark Hopkins at Williams, became a Tamil-speaking missionary on the streets of Madras, India, in 1851, only to die there in 1852. The news crushed their father, who died two weeks after hearing it. Samuel chose as his own mission the study of insects—butterflies, above all, with a preference for skippers, many mailed to him from Madras by David. At twenty a Williams graduate, Scudder wrote a renowned Harvard naturalist, Hermann Hagen, that he “intended to pursue the study of Entomology through as long and short a life as Providence may grant me, and with as much vigor as soundness of mind and body will allow.”142 He pledged to enlist all “the reverence and devotion to faith that had characterized his ancestry” in behalf of this endeavor, to quote his best early biographer.143
Scudder now brought his entomological self to Louis Agassiz, one of the foremost scientists of the age, and studied with him for six years, as a kind of postgraduate assistant, at the Lawrence Scientific School and at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, both at Harvard, from 1857 to 1863. These were tumultuous times in American history, years of civil war but also of a fierce feud over Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which, in 1860, had erupted in Boston, with Swiss-born Agassiz at the podium. Trained in natural science at German universities, Agassiz, at thirty-nine, had arrived in the United States in 1845 with a huge reputation, based on his work on fossil fishes and theoretical investigations of past ice ages. He crossed the Atlantic to study the natural history of the continent but, feted by Americans, accepted an appointment at Harvard and remained there for the rest of his life. Handsome and eloquent, with impressive fund-raising abilities, he was the most exciting thing to happen to the country’s natural science in the years before the Civil War. In 1860, Harvard created the Museum of Comparative Zoology as Agassiz’s very own museum, with a separate faculty and separate students, and, under Agassiz, it became the country’s first high-quality research and teaching institution, with the most complete account of natural history materials in the country. In the first class of students was Samuel Scudder, tuition-free; many, like Scudder himself, aimed to change the character of American natural science.144
Agassiz had at his fingertips a commanding knowledge of European science, and he lifted the level of the natural history tradition in America to a greater excellence. He taught students—and anyone interested in nature—how to collect, identify, label, and sort scientific materials. He spread the use of the microscope, and he fostered embryology, comparative anatomy, and paleontology, all signifying a formative process toward greater complexity he had learned in Paris under Georges Cuvier. A legatee, too, of the renowned Comte de Buffon and a close friend to Humboldt, who greatly respected him, Agassiz was indebted to Humboldt’s ecological mysticism, awed by “a soul-breathing epos” in nature, fusing “all animals and plants” into “an expression of a gigantic conception, carried out in the course of time.” Like Buffon, he was opposed to conventional Linnaean systematics for dealing only with “surfaces,” not with the “true” identity of things as they “really existed in nature.”145 He took seriously things in context, the building blocks that formed species and linked them. To classify and identify “the character of species,” he insisted in his theoretical tour de force, the 1857 Essay on Classification, required knowing their “relations to the world around them, to their kindred, and upon the proportions and relations of their parts to one another.” Food, habits, periodicity of changes, metamorphosis—all demanded scrutiny; “descriptions of species ought to be comparative” and “assume the character of biographies and attempt to trace the origin and development of species during its whole existence.”146 In 1853, Agassiz researched the fish of the United States, sending out six thousand circulars to Americans, urging them to tell him what they knew about the fish in the bodies of water in their towns and regions. The response was tremendous, testimony to legions of new naturalists, although Agassiz never finished his fish book. (Two others, one on turtles, the other on jellyfish, were completed, however.)147
Agassiz’s reputation was also shaped by his hostility to evolutionary thinking, inherited in part from his Paris mentor Cuvier, who, in the 1830s, had disparaged his countrymen Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Comte de Buffon, and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire for imagining that “species” could “pass insensibly into one another” or might have derived from simpler earlier forms. Agassiz, as a young man, had condemned such thinking himself in the German Naturphilosophie of Goethe and Schelling.148 The 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species raised the ante terribly for Agassiz, forcing him, throughout the 1860s, to fight the Darwinian genie.
A sensational moment occurred late in the fall of 1860, when Agassiz joined one of the first public debates on evolution in America, at the Boston Society of Natural History, the reigning such society in the country, founded in 1830 as an outgrowth of the earlier Linnaen Society of New England and funded by wealthy Bostonians.149 Scudder was sitting in one of the front rows, with his fellow students, as Agassiz took the floor to confront William Barton Rogers, a professor of geology, who defended the pro-Darwin position. What an emotional charge this must have carried for Scudder, his teacher at the very zenith of his fame and in the year the Museum of Comparative Zoology had been dedicated. Vain, with noble bearing, Agassiz seemed invincible, and he might have proved so had the times been different and had some quick-thinking colleagues—Harvard’s botanist Asa Gray and geologist Rogers, for example—not been recent converts to Darwinism.150 There were other apostles to Darwin in America, too, not on anybody’s faculty—men like William Henry Edwards and Benjamin Walsh, among the first naturalists in the United States to adopt natural selection as the propulsive engine behind evolution.
In the Boston auditorium that day, Agassiz defended his categorical conviction that species issued ready-made from God, in their totality, and exactly where they now lived, wholly bounded organisms invulnerable to variation and hybridization and to the impact of migrations. According to Agassiz, a continent like North America consisted of independent “islands” set off from other “islands.”151 Except in limited, confined ways, change did not exist as a general phenomenon in nature. As one of Agassiz’s students in the audience observed later, “Prof. Agassiz stated that he knew no such thing as variety in the animal kingdom, except such as are stages of growth, within the limits of species.” When the geologist Rogers countered with fossil data to demonstrate real change from primitive to more advanced forms, Agassiz did not budge, asserting that, in the end, his views would prevail, no matter what Rogers or others might claim.152
Agassiz’s opposition to evolutionary thinking flowed from deep within him, from a fear that all who espoused the theory of evolution aimed to banish God from the universe and invoke the Void. “It was the icy gloom of atheism Agassiz feared,” a modern historian of science has written.153 A religious liberal with a passion for inductive science and contempt for those who relied on the Bible as a source for scientific truth, Agassiz nonetheless believed in something on the order of a Divine Being or a Transcendent Creator. The notion that species might mix, or move from place to place, or that varieties might be more interesting than species, or that species as a category might not exist at all, as William Henry Edwards (following Darwin and Wallace) believed, was anathema to him because he thought it denied the existence of the Supreme Intelligence. God never stumbled. Natural selection, in all its sloppy small steps and variations, did not create nature; the Creator did, and to perfection. Animals were separate from the mediums in which they existed, as far as their origins were concerned.154 Other people might endorse Darwinian ideas and still believe in God; not Agassiz. But articulate as he was, Agassiz did not come off well in this debate and, in fact, offended many who had heard him argue similarly before. To some he seemed simply stubborn. Agassiz himself felt vindicated.155
William Henry Edwards would never meet the men who influenced him most, Darwin and Walsh. Scudder, on the other
hand, as a young man had nearly daily contact with Agassiz, who watched over him like a brooding hen, expected his allegiance, and bestowed on him a priceless feeling of being at a golden moment in the dawning of natural science in America.156 Like all great naturalists, Agassiz taught Scudder to depend on his own eyes when in nature’s gardens, to “look and look again,” until he figured out exactly the characters and conditions that underlay the identity of living things. In their very first meeting, Agassiz removed a fish from alcohol and told Scudder to study it until he could decide what it was that made that fish a fish. He left his student alone in the room for hours, until Scudder came up with something and passed the test; the memory of even the smell of alcohol would never leave him.157 Still, Scudder was not entirely loyal to Agassiz; like others, he was dismayed by Agassiz’s performance in Boston. He also disliked being dictated to, especially from one who demanded independent thinking. In 1863, Agassiz’s most ambitious students, including Scudder, refusing to toe the line any longer, began to publish articles on their own and to seek employment without his consent. Furious and hurt, Agassiz claimed that whatever his students did at the Museum of Comparative Zoology was his “intellectual property” and threatened to expel the guilty students. Whereupon all walked out the door, Scudder among them.158
Nevertheless, Scudder, during his six years’ dose of Agassiz, learned to specialize in the eggs, fossils, and morphological structure of butterflies; to use the microscope adeptly; and to follow the ecological approach to insect life. He became more Humboldtian under Agassiz, who sent him off, in 1860, to Canada, on a thirty-five-hundred-mile round-trip, to observe an eclipse of the sun, just as Humboldt had famously done in Cumaná, Venezuela, in 1789.159 Although tall and strong, Scudder suffered from asthma all his life—it may have kept him out of the Civil War—yet off to Canada he went, eager to please Agassiz, with 650 pounds of chronometers, sextants, telescopes, and containers of alcohol for specimens, which he helped lug around himself, gasping all the way. (After all that, he saw little of the eclipse because of overcast weather.)160 Further, he accepted Agassiz’s views on Darwinism, in part because Agassiz confirmed in him what he had already taken from his father, as from Mark Hopkins and Paul Chadbourne at Williams: that an Unseen Power authored the natural universe. Species were “created independently” and had “a separate existence,” Scudder wrote Benjamin Walsh in 1864. This only ignited Walsh’s caustic wit: “I could easily conceive of yellowness or virtue or patriotism having had an actual independent existence before matter and men were created. The idea that a species has a separate existence of itself reminds me of Paddy’s recipe for making a cannon—‘Take a large hole, and poor melted iron around it.’ Do you believe that holes existed before matter had any existence?”161
Agassiz’s dedication to the study of American nature shaped Scudder’s own desire to study his country’s butterflies above all others. Ever since his epiphany at Williams, he had continued to hunt lepidoptera around Williamstown, but he had also found a better place: the White Mountains of New Hampshire, distinguished by Mount Washington, at all levels inhabited by butterflies, even at the iciest elevation in the East, in swirls of arctic air. He climbed it all seasons and, at the top one day, came upon the caterpillar of a rare arctic butterfly, Oeneis semidea, a hardy refugee of ancient glaciers retreating northward; proud of his discovery, Scudder would record O. semidea’s life history in book after book on American butterflies. He collected along the wagon road and rail route up and down both sides of the mountain, highways for both butterflies and people. On an old wagon road in the woods, he saw banded purples floating up and down or in dense groups on the ground, iridescent blue-and-purple butterflies flecked in red and banded in white. “It is one of the delights of camp life in northern New England to meet this butterfly,” he wrote.162
In 1861, Scudder married a wealthy descendant of Puritans, Ethelinda Blatchford, and they settled in Cambridge, a short walk away from the museum, where he studied with Agassiz and near the Boston Society of Natural History, which hired him—first as recording secretary and later as curator of entomology and librarian; in the 1880s, he became its president. He gave many papers there, once assuming the persona of Humboldt to explain the “distinct zones of life on high mountains,” with insect illustrations from the White Mountains.163 Scudder read the letters of Thaddeus Harris, Scudder’s predecessor at the society as curator of insects, which were stashed away in the society’s archives. Harris was also the first teacher of natural history at Harvard, and along with Titian Peale and John Abbot, a pioneer in the study of the life histories of American insects. A friend of Edward Doubleday’s, he defended the right of Americans to identify their own species and had the “climax of his life” in August 1840, when he found the caterpillar of one of America’s loveliest butterflies, the iridescent blue pipevine swallowtail, named for the food plant it fed upon, crawling about on a shrub in Harvard’s botanical garden. Harris was convinced that he was the “only person” in the country who cared about butterflies and other insects for their own sake. He confided to Doubleday that “you can never know what it is to be alone in your pursuits, to want the sympathy and the aid and counsel of kindred spirits.” At the same time, Harris’s reputation rested largely on his Treatise on Some of the Insects Injurious to Vegetation, the first influential book in America on economic entomology, which treated insects not for their own sake but mostly as pests to be destroyed. Harris wrote the book for farmers and never seemed inclined to criticize the economic thrust of his work, although one of his students at Harvard, Henry David Thoreau, whose two years at Walden Pond derived partly from Harris’s teaching, minced no words about his opposition to economically driven natural science. On seeing the “Beauty of a blue butterfly” one day in the woods, Thoreau observed in his 1859 journal that “the only account of the insects which the State [of Massachusetts] encourages is ‘Insects Injurious to Vegetation.’ We are not interested in birds and insects as they are ornamental to the earth and cheering to man. Come out here and behold a thousand painted butterflies and other beautiful insects, then go into the libraries and see what kind of prayer and glorification of God is there recorded. We have attended to the evil and said nothing of the good.”164
Samuel Scudder admired Thaddeus Harris’s innovative life histories, and, on these grounds, he decided on the spot to edit and publish Harris’s letters, ending with the last about desolated pockets of nature in Cambridge left behind in the wake of “improvements.” It is very unlikely he was ever aware of Thoreau’s attack on Harris’s Treatise. One thing is certain, however: before the late 1860s, Scudder had no plans to concentrate on butterflies, though they were his first love; he thought of himself as a generalist, interested in “the structure and development of [all] insects.”165 Time spent with Harris’s papers, along with Agassiz’s advocacy of all things American, and—perhaps most propelling of all—William Henry Edwards’s plans to publish his Butterflies of North America, helped shift Scudder completely toward butterflies. His attraction to their beauty kept him there. He would never write a thing on economic entomology.
In 1869, the year the Harris letters appeared, Scudder announced that he was beginning a major work on American butterflies, many not yet described or figured. He called the work-to-be The Butterflies of New England but planned to examine all species in the eastern United States and Canada. (Later, he would publish the book under the title The Butterflies of the Eastern U.S. and Canada.) Like Edwards, he, too, began what he thought would be a new kind of book, dealing not just with adults but with every aspect of butterfly life and death, peppered with “abundant colored plates.”166 In line with Buffon and Agassiz, he made no exception: every insect would get its life history or not be published, a stance Edwards did not take at first, since many of the butterflies in his 1872 volume did not yet have life histories.167 To ensure thoroughness, Scudder sent out circulars, as Agassiz had done for his books on fish and turtles, exhorting amateur naturalists
everywhere to catch and rear butterflies for him and then send him the results; he promised (and would give) full attribution.168 “No similar work has ever been attempted,” he wrote, “… but I believe I can succeed by pressing into service the young naturalists of the country.”169
In one month alone, Boston men and women inundated Scudder with dead and “living butterflies (!),” many packed in cotton wool. They sent him lists of butterflies found in different localities, with exact data on the time of “first appearance and the duration of each species,” and even material on the parasites of butterflies “with observations about time and manner of attack.” From Clarissa Guild of Walpole, Massachusetts, Scudder learned about a little ichneumon fly so hungry as to nibble away by itself nearly the entire larva of the painted lady (Vanessa cardui), and from Caroline G. Soule, of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, that the American copper butterfly “slept” by “clinging” to blades of grass “with drooping wings.”170 Gene Stratton-Porter, a well-known nature writer, claimed that Soule and her partner, Ida Mitchell Eliot, had “in all probability raised more different caterpillars for the purpose of securing life history, than any other workers in our country.”171
In the interest of getting data on “insects from every possible quarter to arrive at a definite knowledge of their habits,” Scudder cast a wide net over the continent. “I am anxious to obtain the larvae of all the American species,” he told Henry Edwards of San Francisco in 1869. “Don’t you think you could obtain some of the California species?…I do not believe that the larva of one of the distinctively California species has been described. Here is an open field for you. Why don’t you occupy it? We of the East would be pretty pleased.”172
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