Augustus Radcliffe Grote. Courtesy of the Charles Lee Remington Archives, Entomology Division, Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. Originally published in The Lepidopterist News 2, no. 2 (1948): 17.
Just as with Edwards, Scudder, and Strecker, natural history put Grote in touch with the complexity of the natural world, and reinforced the aesthetic side of his temperament. But Grote had an analytical side as well; he was inclined to look at butterflies and moths inside and out for their scientific value. Neither science nor art alone satisfied him. He wanted both, integrated into what he called “aesthetic entomology.” Strecker shared this approach somewhat, although he never matched Grote in the sophistication of his systematics (and he was mostly indifferent to Darwin). William Henry Edwards and Samuel Scudder gravitated toward systematic analysis, although they never turned their backs on beauty. Hardships in Grote’s life led to his repeated dislocation and depression—a deadly moodiness that interrupted his work—but by the end of the century, he had created a remarkable phylogenetic analysis tracing certain butterfly families back to their ancestral roots. This achievement persuaded one gifted contemporary to praise Grote for his “keen powers of discernment” and “unusual perceptive abilities,” used unsparingly to understand not only moths and nature generally but other people, and himself. Another champion—and one of the country’s premier entomologists—would describe Grote in 1913 as “the best lepidopterist of America, living or dead.”74
In the 1850s, as a young collector, Augustus Grote relied on this 1827 German guide by Johann Meigen, because no American guide then existed. Fortunately, however, some of the German species shared features similar to American ones, aiding in identification. This plate shows the title page...
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... while this plate displays German fritillary species resembling American ones (5a–6a). Nearly at the center of this plate, moreover, is a beautiful species common to both countries (4), in Germany called the trauermantel butterfly, and in America, the mourning cloak, which is what trauermantel means in English. The American name was doubtless the product of German emigration, but why “mourning cloak,” when the butterfly is maroon, yellow, and light blue, without any black? Courtesy of Craig Chesek, © American Museum of Natural History.
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Augustus Grote was born in Aigburth, England, on February 7, 1841, the son of two transplanted parents: his father, Frederic, from Bremen, Germany, and his mother, Anna Radcliffe, from Wales. When he was seven, they moved to Staten Island, joining many German immigrants there. His father, who later helped found the Staten Island Railroad, bought a large farm in the southeast corner of the island, with a pond, ornamental trees, and a nearby woodland, and there, in a landscape similar to the one in nearby Brooklyn, Grote collected butterflies and moths in the mid-1850s, often with two other German-American boys, Fred Tepper of Flatbush and Edward Graef of downtown Brooklyn.75
The boys could not identify precisely a single bug they caught; they had no guide or catalog of American species because no such book existed. All they had to depend on was Johann Meigen’s Handbuch für Schmetterlingsliebhaber (Guide for Butterfly Fanciers), one of the early fascinating German guides, published in 1827; it showed, of course, only German butterflies, but for beginning American collectors it was still an enticing window to the natural world.76 Only three by six inches in size, Meigen’s book explained nets, boards, pins, and mounting methods; it described butterflies through all their life stages, with tips on collecting and poetry enough to stir the imagination of the young. Meigen wrote that “with no class of the animal kingdom has the Creator produced so stunning a diversity of design, color, shade, and form, and in so great a number, as with the butterflies, equipped like colorful jewels, which cannot be emulated in human art, and seize us with wonder.” An appealing example of German natural history, the handbook had pretty pictures of butterflies, some variants of which could actually be found in America. Meigen also portrayed in lurid detail the parasitic behavior of a female ichneumon wasp, a predatory stalker of butterflies that sticks its “stiff stinger” into larvae to lay its eggs, which hatch as worms to devour the prey from within; soon the caterpillar dies, but the wasps pupate, break out of the skin of the “dried‑up larvae,” and fly away.77
With Meigen in his pocket, Grote forged his way through Staten Island and, with Tepper and Graef, collected in Brooklyn. At first, they had two preferred destinations: a grazing meadow for sheep edged by woods, later converted into Prospect Park, and a large vegetable garden near the meadow on what became the junction of Flatbush Avenue and Fulton Street. Over time, they exhausted nearly all of Brooklyn.
In mid-nineteenth century America, both Brooklyn and Staten Island had an alluring mix of wild nature and rural topography, distinguished by fertile flatlands, handsome farmsteads, and “orchards abounding in fruit.”78 For a while in the 1840s, Henry Thoreau worked on Staten Island, as a tutor to the children of Judge William Emerson, a wealthy landowner. “The whole place,” Thoreau recorded in his journal, “is like a garden and affords very fine scenery.” He enjoyed especially “the sea-beach,” so “solitary and remote” that it made one forget Manhattan, across the bay. “The distances, too, along the shore, and inland in sight of the beach, are unaccountably great and startling.”79 Young Grote hiked alone through southern Staten Island, going down to the beach, where he saw so many kinds of butterflies and moths that he would later write, “all good things naturally live in Staten Island.”80 He caught the handsome regal fritillary (Speyeria idalia), flying in unusual numbers in the wet meadowlands, and the harvester butterfly (Feniseca tarquinius), a lovely little orange-and-brown insect, among the rocks of riverbeds and in hedgerows, a butterfly with carnivorous habits, named in Latin after the vicious Roman emperor Tarquinius, its larvae dependent on aphids as food.81
Grote favored moths, or what he, Strecker, and others called the “night butterflies” (“die Nachtschmetterlinge”) or “the night peacock butterflies” (“die Nachtpfauennaugen”). Although there are many exceptions to the rule, moths and butterflies both belong to the same order, Lepidoptera, each undergoing complete metamorphosis and each with wings covered by scales, shingled one upon another, and stamped with a single color that contributes to the total “tiled mosaic” of the wing.82 Both have a proboscis, or a long, slender, coiled‑up tube attached to the head, which the insects uncoil to suck nectar from many kinds of flowers, pollinating as they go; as caterpillars, however, they are much more choosy, some dependent on only one food plant, others on a few, and still others on many different species of plants. On the other hand, the differences between moths and butterflies abound. Again, in the most general terms: the majority of moths have feathery, tapered antennae; these, like radar, guide them through the dark, and the males rely on them to pick up the scent of females. Butterflies generally have clubbed or hooked antennae, used to smell and track down nectar and for sexual purposes. Moths have thick, commonly hairy bodies and large multifaceted, compound eyes and usually inhabit the night, while the majority of butterflies fly by day and have smaller eyes and thinner, relatively hairless bodies. (The classic exceptions for moths belong to the Uraniidae family; they look like butterflies in nearly every respect and are among the most stunning diurnal lepidoptera in the world.) Both are cold-blooded, requiring infusion from the heat of the ambient atmosphere. By the 1870s, Grote was an authority on many moth families, above all the Noctuidae, and for him, moths were no less beguiling than butterflies. In fact, he gloried in them as “among the most beautiful phenomena of nature” (“gehören zu den schönsten Erscheinungen der Natur”).83 He marveled at the “blue and green in the Wandering Hawk Moth” and at the “the pink and yellow of the Rosy Dryocampa.” He wrote, “The moths afford superb instances of the blending of neutral tints, unspeakable soft browns and grays, as in the Smerinthinae.”84
In his search for specimens, the yo
ung Grote rose before dawn for long hikes along the edges of the woods of Staten Island and within them, “seduced,” he said, “by mysterious silences and shadowy vistas,” netting “hawk” moths of the Sphingidae family, robust insects that fly rapidly through the air like hawks, with thick bodies and often colorful, streamlined wings, each feeding on the white-and-purple flowers of the Jamestown weed, common in the region. A notable capture was of a pair of “great green vine hawks.” Even more memorable were the migratory moths or “tropical wanderers” (as Grote called them), which dazzled him in the early fall, “coming up along the coast” on warm air currents from as far away as the West Indies and Surinam.85
Like the moths themselves, Grote came alive at night. So, too, did Strecker, for only then could he dwell on all his lepidoptera—butterflies and moths—freely and without interference. The night had a different magic for Grote, partly because of the moths but also because of the multiformity of life hidden in the darkness, as copious and various as the life of the day. Sometimes, on nocturnal forays, Grote forgot “when to stop and go home to bed,” his quests taking him into other discoveries of what “the night was all about” and “how the world got along in the dark.” But the halcyon days of his youth were short; in 1857, when he was sixteen, an economic panic, fueled by speculation in railroads on Wall Street, devastated his father, who had served as secretary and treasurer of the Staten Island Railroad he had helped found. Cyrus Vanderbilt bought him out and built a stately mansion in the heart of Staten Island, a grating reminder of Frederic’s misfortune, which had dashed his son’s hopes of attending Harvard College. For a time, apparently, Grote went to Lafayette College in Pennsylvania.
One thing was certain about Grote’s life in the early 1860s: his good fortune in meeting Coleman Robinson of Brewster, New York, a successful stockbroker on Wall Street. Robinson, just three years older than Grote, was an enthusiastic amateur lepidopterist, like Grote self-taught about insects. He saw in Grote spiritual and intellectual kinship. Robinson had been buoyed by the capitalist vortex that had dragged down Grote’s father, and by 1871, he would be worth $1.5 million and able to retire, at twenty-seven, and devote all his time to moths.86 Even before this, Robinson had effectively subsidized Grote, pumping steam and money into his aspirations. In 1862 (the year his mother, Anna, died), Augustus, then twenty-one, became the curator of entomology at the new Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences, created that year partly from money donated by Robinson for discovery and assessment of “every animated being and every vegetable indigenous to Buffalo and its vicinity.”87 The two men collaborated there, describing new American moths in checklists and catalogs, and, at Robinson’s expense, visited European museums together (to avoid naming what Europeans had already named accurately) and spent time with stellar entomologists, including Achille Guenée and Jean Baptiste Boisduval in Paris, Rudolf and Cajetan Felder in Vienna, and Gottlieb Herrich-Schaeffer in Berlin.88
But in 1868, Grote’s father cajoled him to leave the museum and resettle in Alabama to join him in a new business. Frederic R. Grote and Sons, Cotton Factors and Commission Merchants, was set up to capitalize on the defeat of the Confederacy by distributing and selling cotton to northern buyers (Grote had managed—like Strecker—to escape the fighting). At the same time, Frederic took a new wife, a southern woman whose family owned a large plantation in Demopolis, Alabama, presumably a base for Frederic’s operations. Augustus ran the business (or so he claimed) from 1869 to 1872.89 But sick and morose, he disliked this “rebel” place. “Sometimes from my desk,” he wrote Scudder in 1869, “I dream of my studies and envy you all.”90 He did manage to become an authority on the cotton worm, one of the scourges of the one-crop plantation system, and he married a southern belle, Julia Blair, the granddaughter of a judge and the relative of a general. The couple honeymooned in Paris, and the following year, in 1871, a daughter was born, adding to Grote’s joy.91 Then, in quick succession, two blows struck: Julia died while giving birth to a second daughter, and his friend and patron, Coleman Robinson, was killed at thirty-three, thrown from his carriage on his country estate in Brewster, New York.92
The outcome of the double tragedy was a plunge into despair, but it also yielded one of the most searching and gratifying periods in Grote’s life, a product of some crucial shift in sympathies in his being, and a sea change from which he emerged a better naturalist. Robinson had left a large legacy of $10,000 to the Buffalo Museum of the Natural Sciences, and had apparently stipulated employment for Grote, should he want it. Eager now to leave Demopolis, Grote wrote George Clinton, the museum’s director, that he did want the job—whatever it was—and, if necessary, would take it at low pay. A year later, he returned to Buffalo, leaving his two infant daughters behind in Demopolis, under the care of their step-grandmother.93
A whirlwind of activity followed for Grote, still in his thirties and now seemingly liberated. He wrote piano music in the classical and popular idiom, poured his heart out in love poems for his dead wife—poems so good that the Atlantic Monthly and other magazines published them—and took active part in the turbulent political and cultural debates of the 1870s, speaking out in Buffalo and elsewhere.94 Buffalo, just like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, had a circle of reform-minded people who believed (as one put it) that “every problem of the universe was in a melting pot.” This circle anointed Grote one of its leaders.95 His reputation reached New York City, and he became a leading contributor to a new journal, the Evolution, one of the many short-lived papers of that time, championing the rights of women and of labor and “of people who have outgrown their political and religious faiths.” Its editors claimed to deal with problems almost entirely new to the United States—the rise of “our great moneyed corporations”; the spread of poverty (“begging from door to door”); the exploitation of women and children; and the status of religion in the new scientific era. In one piece, “The Laborer in Politics,” Grote defended workers against corporations that “establish ruinous competition, and, when they fail to make money … cut down the wages of their employees” or “just the people that can least afford to suffer.”96
Grote also explored in the Evolution ideas about comparative religion in America that would form the basis for a fascinating book, The New Infidelity. In a surprising turn—he was supposedly a secular naturalist who had no interest in churchly matters—he criticized the liberal Protestant churches for attempting to reconcile science and religion. He understood the historic role the Judeo-Christian tradition had played in shaping and preserving Western civilization and worried, therefore, that churches that had tried too hard to integrate modernity into their worldviews would move away from the simple religion of the heart and from spiritual appeals to self-sacrifice and the selfless caring for others. What mattered to him was not theology, which rested on myths and falsehoods, but the “morality of sacrifice” and emotional need. Hence his defense of Judaism and Catholicism (as well as evangelical Protestantism) on the grounds that they answered most profoundly to the heart, not to the mind (at least this was Grote’s contention), and held fast against scientific thinking. The loss of the Judeo-Christian tradition, he insisted, would leave many human beings entirely isolated in the world, without the protection of others, a condition he found intolerable. He also faulted liberal Protestants for seeking “God in Nature,” rather then above Nature. “God is not natural but supernatural,” he insisted. Religion should serve “the Heart and emotions,” not the head, giving succor and peace in a way nothing else could do. Liberal Protestants, the “new infidels,” were abandoning the essence of the religious experience.97
All of these concerns demonstrated the wide-ranging character of Grote’s mind, a way of thinking he shared with his forebears who drew no lines between art and science as well as with his American contemporaries—such as the merchant John Wanamaker, founder of the modern department store, and the philosopher William James, founder of modern psychology—who endorsed feeling over intellect as the foun
dation of religious life. But his major passion remained the moths of North America. Backed by his dead friend’s money, he started out as a librarian and curator in 1872, at a modest yearly salary of $500, and by 1875 had become the director of the Buffalo Museum of Natural Sciences, remaining there for the next five years, at the same salary, despite his efforts to improve the place and despite repeated appeals for a raise.
The work was satisfying, however. Grote created a public lecture series and introduced microscopy; and he published more articles on insects and nature, in the 1870s, for the prestigious Canadian Entomologist than any other naturalist save one, William Henry Edwards—a key index of Grote’s own popularity and influence among American naturalists.98 He created two new journals: the museum’s Bulletin in 1873, writing most of the articles himself, and, in 1879, the apparently privately funded North American Entomologist, which treated economic entomology and included extended and interesting life histories of moths and butterflies, written by both men and women.99 He also translated from German, wrote an analysis in German, and drew on German scholarship on moths. Along with Strecker, Grote was among the first to bestow praise on Maria Sibylla Merian, a brave German naturalist and artist who in the 1690s, under Dutch auspices, sailed to Surinam, a Dutch colony in South America, to collect insects and paint their life histories. She painted butterflies (everything but the eggs) and made “a number of observations on the transformations of Insects that no one has since equaled in the same number of days or months,” Grote wrote. “From the historical background of the Natural Sciences, it is a woman’s face looking to us for well earned remembrance.”100
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