Grote fundamentally changed his approach to the natural world. Throughout the 1860s he opposed Darwin’s theory of evolution, to the chagrin and disgust of the brilliant English émigré Benjamin Walsh, with whom Grote briefly worked on the Practical Entomologist, a tiny monthly bulletin—it lasted barely two years—of the Entomological Society of Philadelphia, distributed free to farmers. Grote, at twenty-six, had been listed as one of the four editors, with Walsh, then at fifty-nine, as associate editor, but Walsh’s effort proved to be of such high quality that he became the only editor, in control of nearly all the writing, “without any pecuniary benefit to myself” (as Walsh put it). The two men clashed by age and personal temperament and, especially, over Darwinism.101 Walsh complained to William Henry Edwards that Grote was “excessively irritated with me because I have preached what [he is] pleased to call the ‘Darwinian’ doctrine, that our N.A. Fauna and Flora are of an old-fashioned type. The fool!”102 In letters to Scudder, Grote bemoaned “Walsh’s prejudicial style of reasoning,” which “can never avail anything or aid the progress of aesthetic entomology,” noting that Walsh “decried the assertions of others without denying the grounds and facts on which these assertions were made.” And as late as 1872, in Alabama, Grote was unflinching about evolutionary doctrine. “I tell you,” he wrote Scudder in that year, “Darwin has had his day already.”103
But by the mid-1870s, Grote was penning pro-Darwinism salvos for the Evolution and defending evolutionary theory in Buffalo. “The question of the day,” he wrote, “is evolutionary—how all these species came about.”104 In itself, Grote’s new perspective was not a radical one. Even naturalists who believed in God had come to accept evolution as a key feature of the natural world, so long as God was considered the governing cause of the evolution.105 But Grote—along with Edwards, Walsh, Charles Valentine Riley, and, over time, Scudder—was radical, since he believed that natural selection and the struggle for existence were the engines of evolution, not God.106 After the sudden deaths of Grote’s wife and his friend Robinson, any personal religious objections Grote may have had to evolutionary science collapsed. “The waste of life in Nature, the suffering and the wrong,” he wrote, “refute the idea of any designing Mind which we can appreciate.” He was now a disbelieving skeptic for whom, as he put it, “the butterflies, like flying flowers, only give pleasure for their beauty, and convey no lesson of immortality.”107
Grote’s conversion to Darwinism brought with it a gradual abandonment of conventional taxonomy, or what Grote called “descriptive Entomology,” which he himself had practiced, and would continue to practice, entailing the systematic grouping of lepidoptera into species and genera. He remained loyal to the “aesthetic” features of an earlier German entomology but not to much of its taxonomic legacy. And, like Edwards, Scudder, Agassiz, Darwin, and all the inheritors of the natural history tradition, he turned to “living nature” as his subject, to how species emerged and where they came from, and to how similar species spread around the globe, as Grote put it, “once connected in geological time.”108
Grote pondered the White Mountain butterfly, Oeneis semidea, the caterpillar he knew Scudder had found feeding on the sedges at the top of Mount Washington. How did such a little thing, with barely an inch wingspan, get to such an inhospitable place? Why, moreover, did the same insect exist on Longs Peak in the Colorado Rockies and in Hopedale, Labrador, to the north? “This is a strange distribution for a butterfly, and so the question comes up as to the manner in which it was brought about,” he observed in an 1875 essay, “The Effect of the Glacial Epoch upon the Distribution of Insects in North America.” For an explanation, he went back thousands of years, to a time when the glaciers surged down from Canada and gouged the topography of New England and Colorado, carrying with them thousands of species, most demolished along the way and a few, such as O. semidea, left behind as warmth forced a glacial retreat northward. “Far off in Labrador,” Grote observed, “the descendants of their ancestral companions fly over wide stretches of country, while they appear to be in prison on top of the mountain” in New Hampshire. Grote’s analysis increased understanding of the geographical distribution of species pioneered by Darwin and Wallace.109 It encouraged lepidopterists to incorporate geographical distribution in their naming and grouping of butterflies and moths. Again, the older practice was exhausted; one had to show more—not geographical distribution alone but the character of evolution itself. “What is the question which at this time is the question among naturalists,” Grote asked in 1875. “Is it not the question of how all the different species and genera came about, rather than a mere cataloguing of them for convenience sake? And will not, therefore, any system of classification which expresses clearly the interrelationships through slight modification of structure, be the classification thinking men will adopt?”110
Grote’s entomology was elevated further in the 1870s when he got to know, through fieldwork as never before, the beauty of the natural world. Ordinarily, he did not go into the field himself, preferring his museum “closet,” as he called it, a hideaway of sorts like Strecker’s “butterfly room,” where, like Strecker, too, he relied on the specimens of others to make his identifications. Nor was this necessarily a fault. “It has been objected,” he wrote in his 1873 Bulletin, “that [museum studies] are of the Closet and not of the Field,” but “I think the student at his books and dead specimens is the same we meet again, where grasses grow, collecting, and observing. So the Field is brought to the House with the Harvest, and can be rightly spoken of from the Closet. It is no excuse that we have been out of doors when we are called upon to speak. Perhaps the seed must be dry at first, to be properly green thereafter. This is the age of objective research. Let us, then, see what we can while we live.”111 This was surely an inclusive, defensible view: diversity of form and structure can be known in a personal cabinet of insects and in the museum room under a microscope as well as in the natural world. Nevertheless, Grote’s memory of his youthful rambles through Staten Island, at dawn and in the dark, was etched powerfully into his being. The open fields beckoned, and Grote left the closet for the moths he knew abounded near Buffalo.
Sometime around April 1873 or ’74, Grote set up a campsite on the southern border of Lake Erie, a favorite spot for him, staying until July and paying his expenses out of his meager salary. The camp stood on a wooded and sandy ridge, with the lake on one side and a farmhouse and level country on the other, meadows and fields of freshly planted corn farther out clearly visible from Grote’s canvas tent. He arrived alone late in the afternoon, carrying gear, clothes, food, several bait traps, setting boards, and a bull’s-eye lamp to lure in moths, “the air saturated with hazy light.”112 On his second night, he sugared according to the English style devised by the Doubleday brothers, Henry and Edward, in the 1830s, slathering a mix of beer and molasses over tree bark to seduce the moths, thereby increasing the number a collector could get. Then he sat patiently with his pipe, rewarded after a while by the arrival of an influx of American lepidoptera, rendered by him lovingly in Latin: “Scopelosoma—walkeri, tristigmata, and morrisoni,” all species of noctuid moths.
At night, asleep in his tent, he was awakened by a startling noise, and for a while he considered ways to escape, since “the tent is a sort of trap that the owner is caught in. You can even be prodded at through the canvas walls. You can see nothing. Through which end will you escape? After coming to this view of the case, it occurred to me that, instead of staying inside and frightening myself, it would be better to go outside and frighten somebody else.” Grote left the tent, felt no danger, and was transported. “What a lovely night! There was no moon; but the radiant floor of heaven was trimmed with stars.” The following morning all about him was “the spring, bringing out leaf and blossom.” Day and night, animals of all kinds, not moths alone, came within reach of his tent—bluebirds, a kingfisher watching by the brook, a chipmunk “curious to see what manner of man had ventured into his realm,�
� and two hapless flying squirrels, which, “blinded by his bull’s eye” at night, had been trapped in his “butterfly net.” In July, with warmer weather, the catocalas “swarmed like bats” around him, responding to his baits, hurling in from all points in such a morphological diversity as to amaze and exhilarate him.
Collecting on Lake Erie gave Grote insight into the extent of American species and an ecstatic and rejuvenating sense of nature, not unlike Humboldt’s “soothing” experiences. “Skies are fairer in America,” Grote observed, with shades of Doubleday as well as Humboldt, and “the collector can still find the possible known as well as the possible unknown, for I myself caught and first discovered specimens of the butterfly Calephelis borealis and many an undescribed moth has dropped into my collecting bottle.” He later wrote up these species in detail for the Canadian Entomologist, under such euphonious Latin titles as Hadena delicata, Mamestra vicina, and Dryobota stigmata grote.113 “It had been a happy time,” he recounted in his final reflection, “stolen from Death and Bad Luck, full of Life itself strengthened by work. A time to realize the truth of Kepler’s assertion that this world itself is heaven in which we live and move and are, we and all mundane bodies.”
Grote shared these sentiments about nature with Herman Strecker, more perhaps than with any other contemporary, and each hoped to do great things with the other, a destiny that Edwards and Scudder seemed to share with each other as well. But fate had a different future in store for all four pioneer butterfly men. Scudder’s and Edwards’s friendship, so guardedly cultivated across the Atlantic, would wear thin and then break for a time, over matters profound and petty. For Strecker and Grote, the outcome would be far worse, fed by suspicions and doubts, and ending in disaster.
THREE
Beating Hearts
In early January 1859, Alfred Russel Wallace spotted a rare butterfly fluttering about a flower on the forested island of Batchian in Malaysia, a sighting since recounted many times over as symbolic of the collecting passion, hauntingly fictionalized by Joseph Conrad in Lord Jim. “On taking it out of my net and opening the glorious wings my heart began to beat violently,” Wallace recalled, “the blood rushed to my head, and I felt more like fainting than I have done when in apprehension of death. I had a headache the rest of the day.” “None but a naturalist can understand the intense excitement I experienced when at length I captured it.” The insect was “fiery golden-orange, changing when viewed obliquely, to opaline-yellow and green,” a birdwing later named by Wallace Ornithoptera croesus. “It is, I think, the finest of the Ornithoptera, and consequently the finest butterfly in the world.”1
Natural history, as it spread throughout Europe and America, offered nearly unconditional communion with the beauty and power of nature. Its strongest expression came for many butterfly people when their hearts beat quickly in the presence of some extremely desirable thing, unleashing in their bodies the energy of the hunter; nothing seemed to rival collecting in the way it unlocked the most intense feelings, carrying or pushing the collector forward to gain possession in the face of often impossible odds. In 1874, Eugene Pilate, a physician and French immigrant in Dayton, Ohio, wrote to Herman Strecker about a moth he caught as a boy: “I can remember as if yesterday how my heart beat when I first caught a Lichenee blue (noctua catocala fraxini), like you when you got your first Catocala Amatrix.” Around the same time, in a southern California desert, William Greenwood Wright chased after a black swallowtail “floating over low shrubs as only a papilio can” until the butterfly’s “strong wings beat vainly against my net, sending thrills of pitying exultation through my fingers.… With hands trembling with excitement I stowed the prize away.” James Fletcher, one of Canada’s most admired naturalists, recounted for Samuel Scudder the time he “caught” his first “Vanessa Antiopa with trembling hands and bated breath on fallen pears lying on the ground beneath a tree in our garden.” Henry Edwards’s “heart beat violently” when he came upon “a lovely black and orange moth, such as I had never before seen” in the Plenty Ranges just outside Melbourne. “I felt as if I should have gloried in making those primeval woods echo with my shouts,” he wrote. In a mountainous region in India, Will Doherty, at twenty-seven soon to become America’s greatest tropical collector, came close to fainting when he spied a butterfly feeding on the brilliant orange flowers of a Mussaenda bush, a seven-inch-wide “black and gold” Troides minos, one of the largest butterflies in India. Doherty took dozens of this butterfly and “thought the gold of their wings the most gorgeous yellow in nature or art.”2
One hundred forty years later, Arthur Shapiro, a gifted California butterfly man and expert, remembered similar experiences that made his heart pound hard: “It began when I was ten or eleven and was especially true when I saw something ‘special’ and didn’t have a net—which was, of course, most of the time. I got very good at catching stuff with my hand, and it was during the stalk that I got ‘palpitations.’ ” “I occasionally have the experience today, [and] I certainly did in 1977, at Cambirumeina in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in NE Colombia. I’d been on the trail for three days, [and] as I neared the top of the pass, the clouds parted, the sun shone brightly, and a female Reliquia flew right by. Of course, I could not get my net out in time, it was gone, the clouds closed back in—and I supposed that was the only female I would ever see! Fortunately, it wasn’t. And within two days, I had eggs. But I’m not sure I ever had a higher adrenaline level in my life than I had at that moment—even in a fight-or-flight situation.”3
In 1896, the philosopher George Santayana, then a young instructor at Harvard College, wrote a memorable book on aesthetics, The Sense of Beauty; in it, he tried to explain the beating hearts, drawing, perhaps, from his own personal experience and from his intensive reading of natural history and Darwinian evolutionary science at Harvard, most of which he did with the philosopher William James. His subject here was sex: “If any one were desirous to produce a being with a great susceptibility to beauty, he could not invent an instrument better designed for that object than sex.” Every human being, he maintained, has a sexual desire to merge with “more and more definite objects,” first “to one species and one sex, and ultimately to one individual.” Many people fail in their attempts, “the differentiation is not complete,” and “there is a great deal of groping and waste,” especially for the young just coming to terms with desire. Santayana embraced the groping and waste. In a view not far from the secular and unsentimental one later expressed by Sigmund Freud in his 1930 Civilization and Its Discontents, he observed that “sex is not the only object of sexual passion. When love lacks its specific object, when it does not yet understand itself, or has been sacrificed to some other interest, [it] must be partially stimulated by other objects than its specific or ultimate one; especially in man, who, unlike some of the lower animals, has not his instincts clearly distinct and intermittent, but always partially active, and never active in isolation. We may say, then, that for man all nature is a secondary object of sexual passion, and that to this fact the beauty of nature is largely due.” Without groping and waste, there was no culture or art, and “no ability to see the maximum of beauty” in “nature unadorned,” in the “physical world, which must continually be about us.” Nature requires human sexuality to expose “its deepest meaning and beauty.”4
Santayana never mentions beating hearts or butterflies, and one might dismiss his views as reductive and propose other reasons for the arousal—and, yes, surely there are other reasons, such as a genetic disposition like “biophilia,” as the Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson argues, or a psychological one like family conflict or abuse leading a child to escape into the otherness of other species, as Wilson also suggests in his autobiography, Naturalist.5 Or was it the natural colors and forms, taking shape inside the mind even before the mind could see and then, in childhood, attaching itself to the colors and forms outside the self? Was it the sensuous wildness of the natural color, too, that once observed is never fo
rgotten and is itself so generative?6
Yes, it was all these things, which, taken together with repressed sexuality radiating desire throughout the natural world, had the power to nurture in young and old alike a longing for nature and an ability to see it aesthetically. Collecting channeled and deepened this experience by bringing individuals purposely into physical contact with the world of butterflies and moths. It placed people inside the fullness of nature, where boundaries between species were weakest, and all was ebb and flow between them.7 Collecting exposed a hidden generative realm, shared by both human beings and butterflies, that imparted to many an overpowering feeling of being alive and of knowing that this is who you are and why you are. James Tutt, one of the foremost butterfly men of England in the late nineteenth century, wrote that collecting connected the collector not only to the butterfly but to the context in which the butterfly existed, the flowers and carrion it fed upon, the surrounding insects and the predatory birds, the ambient air, the sunlight, the blended smells (and, he might have added, to the wildness of the natural color), climaxing in an “exquisite sense of enjoyment” nothing could replicate. Collecting brought individuals in touch with the forms, patterns, shapes, and colors of the natural world, which would all be meaningless or invisible were it not for the desire inside human beings to reach beyond the self. “If science grows out of collecting,” Tutt concluded, “so much the better, but, with the feelings we possess even the charm of collecting cannot be altogether in vain.”8
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