He stepped in on Edwards’s behalf in a nonfinancial way as well, after learning that neither the Academy of Natural Sciences, in Philadelphia, nor the American Entomological Society subscribed to The Butterflies of North America. This was a terrible sign since writers like Edwards depended on the endorsements of such institutions. “How does it happen,” Scudder wrote the director of the academy, that it is not “down as a subscriber” for Edwards’s volume 2? “Unless the list can be increased,” he explained, “there is danger that its appearance may be checked or even discontinued. It would be an immense pity if this should happen, as the Butterflies of North America is a great credit to American science and art, far superior in matter and expression to anything done abroad.”96 Scudder complained that Edwards’s “great work” had to be “carried on by him at more or less a dead loss, under very adverse circumstances,” and “at so heavy an expense” to the author himself.97 No one realized more than Scudder how much money and sweat Edwards had poured into his book. His own massive three-volume study, overall, took an even greater effort than Edwards’s.
Between 1879 and 1889, Scudder was a neo-Calvinist tornado of productivity, his only escape vacations with his much-loved son, Gardiner, a student at the time at both Harvard and the Harvard Medical School. The two summered together in a remote wild enclave on the coast of Maine, there seeing their first migration of monarch butterflies; in the winter, with paths blanketed by whiteness, they climbed Mount Washington, in the White Mountains, Scudder’s old haunt full of unusual fauna.98 Mountain climbing was a metaphor for Scudder’s life as a naturalist; he reached many peaks. As assistant librarian of Harvard College, he completed two comprehensive scientific catalogs, the first commissioned by Harvard, Catalogue of Scientific Serials, on all the scientific writing in periodicals since 1633, and the second for the Smithsonian in Washington, Nomenclator Zoologicus, on the generic names for all animals, fossil or otherwise, used by naturalists from ancient times to 1879. Each book cost him tremendous pains, “dreary,” as he put it, beyond imagining. But together they yielded a vast reservoir of data for naturalists, who no longer had to track such information down for themselves; Scudder had done the work for them.99 From 1882 to 1885, he edited Science Magazine, eating up time, energy, and creativity. Its collapse liberated him, however, for what became his next extraordinary work, on fossil butterflies.
Scudder had seen his first fossil butterfly and the first ever found, in France, when caring for his wife at the end of her life; it had been unearthed in Marseilles in 1873, and was so curious a find that he left her bedside to see it for himself.100 He soon became one of the most advanced authorities on fossil butterflies in the world, worked the fossil beds in Canada and Colorado, and, in 1886, got appointed paleontologist to the United States Geological Survey, a post he would hold for the next six years.101 Today, we know of only forty-four fossil butterflies, reaching back more than sixty million years, a fragile residue of the time when flowering plants and other animals first appeared.102 Scudder exhumed more fossil lepidoptera than anyone else, before or since, and in 1886, he described them for the first time in an essay, “The Fossil Butterflies of Florissant” (a fossil bed in Colorado) for the Eighth Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey to the Secretary of the Interior. He named a number of species, among them the River Styx nymphalid and Charon’s nymphalid, and two snout butterflies, including a tropical vagabond snout, with relatives in Africa, “separated from its ancient home by the wide ocean.”103 All extinct, they dated from a time when the continents were fused and the earth was wetter and warmer. This publication alone would have established Scudder as a leading paleontologist, but at the end of the decade, he completed a greater task, a 750-page book on all the fossil insects ever known and named, of which James Fletcher, a close friend, asked, “How on Earth do you manage to do so much work, and keep your senses?”104 Joseph Lintner “felt a just pride that such a work has been accomplished in our country, and by one of our entomologists.”105 William Henry Edwards, in a letter to Scudder, called the book “a stupendous amount of hard work,” high praise from one so stingy. “It is wonderful that such a number of species managed to inter themselves so that you could find them, and do honor to them.”106
Any one of these contributions, then, would have been enough to satisfy any ambitious naturalist. But Scudder was grappling also with living lepidoptera, for research on his three-volume Butterflies of the Eastern U.S. and Canada (henceforth, Butterflies).107 Compared to all previous works on butterflies in America, his volumes were gargantuan, published so rapidly in parts as to seem to come out all at once, in one sweeping moment, like a great burst of light at the end of a long corridor. Scudder defrayed the cost of the production of Butterflies with fifty-dollar subscriptions, but they met only a small part of the expense. The rest he paid for himself, having dropped or been dropped by his earlier publisher, Hurd and Houghton, after it became Houghton Mifflin. He proofread every page, consuming four hours daily on it for days (“Above all, take care of your eyes,” urged his friend James Fletcher), and wrote, as well, many letters, almost always by himself, to get much of the data about the lives of butterflies with which to construct his life histories.108
By any measure, Butterflies is awe-inspiring, unlike any work ever published. One feature stands out: like Strecker, Edwards, and Grote, Scudder tied his science to art, but doubly—pictorially and with poetry. His fervor for pictures derived from Agassiz, who’d derived his from the great European pictorial tradition. Agassiz had already conveyed how critical pictures were to the transmission of knowledge about the natural world.109 In 1862, eager to apply photographic techniques to scientific illustration, he supervised revision of Thaddeus Harris’s 1841 Treatise on Some of the Insects Injurious to Vegetation, with help from Scudder and others, adding to it drawings done with “the utmost accuracy and perfection.”110 In 1869, Scudder released his own first plate for Butterflies, done as a chromolithograph. It elicited great praise from Henry Bates in England: “Your specimen of chromolithography as applied to the representation of butterflies is the most beautiful I have yet seen.”111 Twenty years later, in his volume 3, Scudder published pictures on nearly every feature of butterfly existence, each plate reproduced photographically by a gelatin process developed in Boston. In several lithographs and drawings, the eyes, antennae, genitalia, legs, and palpi (jointed sensory organs on each side of the mouth, bedecked with hairs and scales) of the imagoes of several adult butterflies from different families appeared in orderly rows or arrangements, the body parts exaggerated in size, delicately depicted, and dramatic in their repetitive progression. Other plates of the eggs of butterflies, often in color, magnified and drawn through a microscope, had a character never before seen in this way, each as lovely as any snowflake. For the majority of imagoes, Thomas Sinclair of Philadelphia prepared the chromolithographs, relying on eight to fifteen stones; others appeared as black-and-white woodcuts or engravings.112 If Scudder’s pictures lacked the artisanal beauty of Strecker’s and the lucid precision of Peart’s (Peart also depended on the microscope, and used Lydia Bowen’s exquisite colors), they were unsurpassed for depth of knowledge, drawing on the latest technical processes, just short of relying on photography itself, though still in touch with natural history traditions.
The butterflies here boast eyes, tongue, legs, and palpi from two major butterfly families, the Nymphalidae and the Lycaenidae. Palpi are small body parts that protrude from the head of the butterfly and that contain—according to modern science—numerous hairy sensors able to detect scents. See Butterflies of the Eastern United States and Canada, vol. 3, plate 54.
Click here to view a larger version of this image.
Scudder relied on more than visual art to enhance his science, employing the art of real, unashamed poetry, often long excerpts taken from some of the greatest poems in the Western tradition, occupying nearly every page of his massive fifteen-hundred-page tour de force. Poetry was enlisted
to introduce every life history and every excursus, Scudder’s digressions on ecological themes. He opened the work with a remarkable excerpt from The Spanish Gypsy, a book-length poem by George Eliot; spoken by Don Juan, the aristocratic hero of the text, the excerpt reads:
Repent? Not I.
Repentance is the weight
Of undigested meals ta’en yesterday.
’Tis for large animals that gorge on prey,
Not for a honey-dipping butterfly.
I am a thing of rhyme and redondillas,
The momentary rainbow on the spray
Made by the thundering torrent of men’s lives:
No matter whether I am here or there;
I still catch sunbeams.
What a curious way for a middle-aged Congregationalist to begin his book. Did those who inhabit the realm of sunbeams have no need to repent? Are people themselves free of sin in such a world?
Some excerpts came from Seneca and Horace, but since the early poets showed little affinity for butterflies, Scudder quickly exhausted them, preferring later authors on both sides of the Atlantic, above all the Romantics, with their incredible number of references to butterfly life. Some poems were by Scudder’s American friends Augustus Grote and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. A respected American reformer who studied with Thaddeus Harris at Harvard, Higginson had a passion for butterflies and championed the work of Emily Dickinson. “Thou winged blossom! liberated thing!” Higginson observed in “Ode to a Butterfly.” “What secret tie binds thee to other flowers/Still held within the garden’s fostering?” Grote, in an untitled poem wrote, “Pretty flower that June remembers/Blossom that July forgets.”113 More often, Scudder quoted from such figures as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Christina Rossetti, and especially the late Romantic Robert Browning. Thus, from Browning’s Dramatis Personae:
On the rock, they scorch
Like a drop of fire
From a brandished torch,
Fell two red fans of a butterfly;
No turf, no rock, in their ugly stead,
See, wonderful blue and red.
And from The Ring and the Book:
Some finished butterfly,
Some breathing diamond-flake with leaf-gold fans,
That takes the air, no trace of worm it was.114
Naturalists had drawn on poetry before, but never to the same degree. In the end, Scudder tallied more than 150 poets.
At first, his purpose was quite simple: to use a few poems “here and there” to keep the interest of the reader, who, he thought, would want “relief from the dry synonymy.” But another motive took over, and he began to select poems of “some special significance.” But what this meant Scudder never made clear or even addressed. Perhaps the meaning can be found in the overriding Romantic character of the poetry, for nearly all of it encouraged the reader to live in a sin-free land of beauty and butterflies, and to do them no harm. His reliance on poetry as a whole, however, Romantic as well as non-Romantic, had an even stronger cause: a respect for the word and for the educational power of the written word. This distinguished nearly all of his writings, as, indeed, it did those of Grote, Edwards, and Strecker, and of the natural history tradition as a whole. Just as he observed how butterflies lived and died in relation to the whole environment around them, so he showed how poetry and art related to butterflies, and how the study of butterflies belonged to the Western tradition. Through an imaginative work of natural science, he exposed Americans to the greater creative culture.
Scudder’s Butterflies had many other distinctions, of course, well beyond its poetry, beginning with a ninety-page introduction on the butterfly stages (egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, and imago) and backed by plate illustrations in volume 3 of all the stages, often in microscopic detail. Also, his informative survey of the history of butterfly classification (from Linnaeus to William Henry Edwards) reflected great knowledge of and respect for his precursors. The plates in volume 3 on different ways to classify species—four pages on genitalia, five on wing venation, sixteen on external morphology, and so forth—were exemplary, as were the two long and instructive essays commissioned by Scudder and written by two Darwinian naturalists, William Morris Davis, a professor of physical geography at Harvard, and Charles William Woodworth, a young man from Illinois who had studied insects under Hermann Hagen at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, in Cambridge. Davis discussed the biogeography of New England, especially the glacial carving out of the landscape; Woodworth, the evolution of the egg of the mourning cloak butterfly from a mass of similar cells (the blastoderm) to a more complex differentiation. Both essays revealed great advances in glaciology and embryology since the 1820s and Scudder’s own conversion to Darwinism.115 Volume 3 of Butterflies boasted the first plates ever published showing the distribution of species in America, and it concluded with a map of Scudder’s grandest butterfly spot: the alpine districts of the Great Range in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
Scudder never wavered on many of his older positions, those that William Henry Edwards had reviled in the early 1870s. Following Henry Bates and others, he continued to place the Nymphalidae (the wood nymphs, satyrs, fritillaries, the “purples,” and so forth) at the top of the butterfly chain, while kicking the Papilionidae (the swallowtails) toward the bottom, near the Hesperiidae (the lowly skippers). Almost shamelessly, he described the Nymphalidae as a “higher grade of life,” because, among other things, they “are the most sprightly and vivacious” insects, “the most audacious” and “the fondest of propinquity to man and his cultivations,” besides being “endowed with the most varied psychological traits.” Scudder never budged from his enthusiasm for Hübner’s often bizarre generic names. Nor did he—nor would he ever—renounce vernacular names, despite what he called the earlier “violent opposition” to his approach (he even added some new ones, especially for the skippers).116 It helped, of course, that other naturalists—including Grote—had come around to agreeing with him.
The meat of the book was the life history of hundreds of American butterflies and the essays called “excursuses” on butterfly existence. In the life histories Scudder freely acknowledged the help he’d gotten, above all from William Henry Edwards, who, more than any butterfly man of the age, had inspired entomologists to give up their emphasis on classification and “dead, dried” specimens, and to embrace life, the living, breathing butterfly in all its glory, as the subject of interest. A great beneficiary of Edwards’s example, Scudder quoted him profusely on nearly every page.117 “Mr. Edwards thinks” and “Mr. Edwards states” echo so often in the life histories that any ordinary reader might have thought them the work of two men, not one. Scudder incorporated Edwards’s prose into his own, fulfilling a promise he had made to Edwards shortly before resigning his editorship of Science: to “re-write the life histories” (as they had appeared in his 1879 book Butterflies) “and take from you largely!” (“He is right there,” Edwards wrote Lintner, “and I trust then we shall have no more romances.”)118
Scudder began each history with the butterfly’s name in both its Latin and its vernacular forms, with a synonymy or record of all the names imparted to it over time, followed by a taxonomic description of the butterfly—almost invariably, in wearying detail—but then, almost as invariably, by a lively and engrossing account of the real life history of the butterfly, its various stages, its food plants, its enemies and defenses, and its relationship to other species and genera. He finished each portrait with a constructive reflection of what remained to be done, which often amounted to a great deal: more on eggs and larvae, more on the mysteries of metamorphosis, more on variable forms, more on parasites, more on everything. As his opening surveyed the history of the butterfly systematics, so his concluding remarks placed Butterflies in a stream of investigation, alive with the present, tied to the past, and preparing the way for work to come. The reader feels the amazement Scudder felt in the face of all America’s butterflies, their shapes, forms, patterns, and colors.
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br /> The excursuses in Butterflies, interspersed among the life histories, gave Scudder himself his strongest sense of pride, encompassing a vast range of subjects, from the “lethargy of caterpillars” to biographies of early naturalists. No American—no writer of any kind—had ever before dwelled so thoughtfully on butterfly life.119 The results led the respected British butterfly experts Karl Jordan and Walter Rothschild to conclude in 1906 that “no other work on Butterflies can be compared to it,” and Nabokov, seventy years after that, to declare of Scudder’s “stupendous work” that it “inaugurated a new era in lepidopterology.”120 Even William Henry Edwards—despite his critical take on everything Scudder wrote—conceded, with ever-increasing certainty as he mulled them over, the value of Scudder’s volumes. “I differ with Mr. Scudder radically about many things,” he explained (he never got beyond “Mr. Scudder”), “but in other important and essential points this work of his is and will forever remain unapproachable.” He praised Scudder’s “wealth of illustration” as “amazing, not only of the butterflies themselves, but of every part and organ of them, and what has never been attempted before except on a limited scale, the eggs and larvae are shown in greatly magnified and admirably executed figures.” Furthermore, on matters “of anatomical details, worked out with wonderful ability, and the life histories and distribution worked out with exceeding care, the Butterflies of the Eastern U.S. and Canada will be a standard work, and no student can possibly get along without it. Therefore, I say to my friends, subscribe without delay.”121
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