Butterfly People

by William R. Leach

  Edwards, too, had experienced the adverse impact on nature of human beings, after years of perhaps never thinking twice about it. Sometime in the early 1880s, the U.S. Corps of Engineers completed construction of a system of movable dams and locks along the Kanawha River near Coalburgh that, when opened, released a flood of water, lifting and floating vessels on an “artificial tide.” Part of one of the most impressive public works projects in U.S. history, and backed by coal mine owners to make river transport competitive with rail, the new system replaced the old, inefficient towboat introduced by William Henry Edwards around 1870.90 A rapid influx of water into Fraser’s swamp, along the banks of the river near Edwards’s home, destroyed the habitat of one of his most beloved butterflies, the baltimore checkerspot. Over time, the old water level in the swamp returned, but the butterflies were gone, so, at six a.m. one May morning in 1884, Edwards restocked the swamp with adult checkerspots he had bred himself, setting free six females; the next day, he released fifteen males and an additional female. The experiment was a “great success,” he reported to Scudder, and Scudder concluded that the butterfly was “more enduring than most species as is proved by its requiring more violent means to extinguish life.”91

  And what of the beauty of butterflies? Were all the aesthetically pleasing features of nature—the symmetries of line and patterns, the forms and colors human beings had come to associate with beauty itself—were all these merely the fruit of the need of butterflies and other organisms to defend themselves and adapt? Was living beauty reducible only to function or utility? In 1870s and ’80s, the glories of the butterfly wing were the subject of engrossing interest, and many Western naturalists—William Henry Edwards, Augustus Grote, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Samuel Scudder, among them—claimed that, yes, natural selection did cause the beauty. Scudder, in particular, seemed to be emphatic: The “more we contemplate natural selection, the more we comprehend how powerful an element it has been in the development of the varied world of beauty around us.” Like Darwin and Wallace, who much influenced him, Scudder believed that the morphology of butterflies and moths was a response to their menacing environment. “A very large proportion of the colors and patterns upon the wings of butterflies, far larger, I believe, than is generally conceded,” he wrote in his excursus “Color Preferences of Butterflies: The Origin of Color in Butterflies,” “must be looked upon as protective and to have originated in the simplest possible manner through natural selection.… It seems that we shall have to concede to the same laws of development which have moulded the structure and form of all organized beings, the power to develop that wonderful display of color and pattern on the wings of butterflies which appeals so powerfully to the aesthetic sense of every human being.”92 Agassiz was, it seemed, dead. Or was he?

  Nearly all his life Scudder had viewed the visual complexity of the lepidoptera as “a synonym for all that is delicate and exquisite,” beyond anything in the insect world or, perhaps, in all nature; he considered the wings especially exceptional, because they contained features not explicable “as purely for the purposes of the ephemeral creature itself.”93 Part of this beauty was invisible, most notably the tiny scales on the scent glands of many male butterflies, called androconia. (That term, a Greek compound word invented by Scudder in the 1870s meaning “male cone-shaped figures,” is still in use today.) Scudder, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, championed the microscopic study of butterfly morphology and of the “inside” life of natural forms, examining the eggs, parts of the caterpillar, and the antenna and proboscis of the imago. The androconia occurred as a black slash on the forewings to attract females, and differed “marvelously from ordinary scales in the variety of their form and exquisite structure,” as Scudder put it in one of his last essays, “Sexual Diversity in the Form of the Scales.”94 Scudder, who wrote four excursuses having explicitly to do with the color of the wings, was moved and perplexed by this spectacle, observable only through the microscope. Why were the scales so ornate and detailed when neither the eyes of predators nor the eyes of butterflies themselves (whose color vision, in any case, was weak, able to apprehend only masses of color, not specific images) could perceive them? “Who is to see and benefit by them?” Scudder asked. “Assuredly not the insects themselves; they may profit, indeed, by their function, and no doubt natural selection has perfected that to the uttermost, even beyond our ken.” But these “objects” are “invisible to them.” “Is there not here a beauty of form and structure which is an end in itself, subserving no material end, of no possible profit to the possessor?” Yes, he answered, and it has nothing to do with natural selection but, instead, arises from some “infinite and eternal divine force, guiding all forces, an infinite, uplifting power, which we may trust,” and which human beings have “not yet comprehended.”95

  All this applied equally to the visible, or outside, surfaces of butterflies, for even though Scudder had recognized that, from the point of view of the insects themselves, natural selection had “borne its part in the work,” he believed it insufficient to cover all the ground: “There has not yet been brought forward one single line of evidence to show that natural selection can produce that harmony of tint and design which each of the whole tribe of butterflies displays on its individual surface; a harmony so infinitely extended when comparisons are begun that the eternities would not suffice to exhaust them.” Here, too, Scudder cited a “preordaining plan” or some “higher law, which has other ends for beauty.” And what were these “other ends”? To please human beings, Scudder asserted, in a down-to-earth, unscientific sort of way. But rather than say this in his own words, he quoted from an exponent of German aesthetic entomology. “I cannot do better,” he wrote, “than translate from Adolf Werneburg, Der Schmetterling und sein Leben (1874): ‘When we consider,’ Werneburg says, ‘the remarkable splendor of color which is not only peculiar to Lepidoptera in a far higher degree than to any other group of insects, but which is also displayed before the eyes of the observer in a remarkable way; and when we further remember that in many cases the color is not of the slightest use to the creatures themselves, but rather of disadvantage by its luster and brilliancy, we cannot forbear to enquire into the meaning and purpose of such a phenomenon. And here I at least am unable to find any other reply than this: that the beauty of butterflies serves to enliven and embellish, and thereby, like all other beauties of nature, to do its part in the cultivation of the human mind and heart. With this agrees the fact that it is precisely those that fly by day, when man is most in the open air, and beauty can be more readily observed, that are the most beautiful.’ ”96

  This plate, with images magnified at 150/1, reveals the scent glands of a few male butterflies, with their scales shingled one upon the other in undulating folds. Scudder called them androconia, from Greek for “male cones or scales.” Note number 2, showing the monarch vein on the forewing, with accompanying pouch, concealing the density of scales of the butterfly; see, too, the androconia of the regal fritillary (number 4), which are “mingled with the scales covering the vein” on the hindwing. For Scudder, these scales had a “beauty” that seemed to serve no adaptive purpose but derived its power from some “mysterious,” unknown cause, or existed, perhaps, merely for the sheer delight of human beings. See Butterflies of Eastern United States and Canada, vol. 3, plate 44.

  Click here to view a larger version of this image.

  In a context that was, by the 1880s, very pro-Darwin and pro-functionalism about natural forms, it was brave of Scudder to take this position. Nevertheless, earlier in this very decade he had also equivocated, attacking early on the position he would later defend. Scudder criticized Edwards, in 1877, for not “appreciating the real beauty of Nature.”97 Yet shortly thereafter, he argued in his 1881 book, Butterflies, in a chapter called “Ancestry and Classification,” that those naturalists with a passion for the color and designs of lepidoptera actually jeopardized the cause of entomological science. “The progress in the classi
fication of butterflies,” he observed, “or the appreciation of their true interrelationships has been grievously checked by the very charm which so often attracts men to their study. There is such a rage for their collection by amateurs, enchanted only by their exquisite beauty, that their scientific study has been largely abandoned by those who are best fitted for this work by special scientific training.” Eight years later, Scudder republished “Ancestry and Classification” in The Butterflies of the Eastern U.S. and Canada, as excursus 7, but under the title “Ancestry and Butterflies.” Much of the text was exactly the same as had appeared in the earlier volume, although the passage above had been omitted. Why had Scudder changed his mind? Was it because he had come to see the injustice of his claim, that, among other things, it pretty much encompassed nearly all his contemporaries, that it blamed the fanatical lovers of beauty (read: Strecker) for the failure of other Americans to embrace natural science, and that it disparaged his own love of beauty as the genesis of his vocation? Possibly all the above, and also possibly the fact that, for whatever reason, he may have undergone a conversion or, at the very least, a resurgence of the confidence in things he may have learned earlier in his life. Perhaps, too, Scudder’s attitude toward beauty had changed because he had fallen under the influence of the modern arts and crafts movement that affirmed beauty as a central part of everyday life. Nearby his home in Cambridge was the studio of Sarah Wyman Whitman, a follower of that movement who specialized in iridescent colors and created stained-glass windows in the manner of John LaFarge. Whitman painted Scudder’s portrait in 1884, giving him the look of a colorist himself, poet of dreams and reveries.98

  This portrait of Scudder was done in 1884 by Sarah Whitman, an accomplished Boston artist inspired by Art Nouveau, a movement just emerging on the art scene. Whitman transformed Scudder into a poetic dreamer (and perhaps, at times, he was).

  Scudder belonged to a minority of naturalists at the time who took the “charm” of butterflies and of all nature seriously in its own right; rather than shutting one door (the aesthetic) in order to open another (the scientific), he seemed prepared, in the late 1880s, to open both doors, ready to accept beauty both out of context, as it were, standing alone, in the service of the advancement of human beings, and in context, or in relation to everything else, from the parasitoids to the androconia, nature in all its “multiplicity and mystery,” to quote Humboldt once again.

  Still, Scudder was not alone. Alfred Russel Wallace, the cofounder with Darwin of evolutionary theory and exponent of natural selection, contended that natural selection did much to explain the appearance of moths and butterflies. He also believed that the sensuous surfaces of the butterfly wing and of other organisms existed simply to delight people like himself. “What could be the use of the butterfly’s gaily-painted wings,” he wrote, “except to add the final touches to a world-picture, calculated at once to please and refine mankind?”99 Herman Strecker, a Humboldtian agnostic, had no need to wrestle with this question; he was merely grateful for all the glory that flooded in upon him from everywhere on the planet and, like his British mentor, William Hewitson, let no law of nature interfere with his gratification. William Henry Edwards, a Darwinian committed completely to the scientific method, “reverenced the facts and meant to abide by them,” as he put it to Scudder, yet he rejoiced over the plates of Mary Peart and Lydia Bowen that enhanced and gave meaning to his volumes, and, presumably, to the nature they reproduced.100

  Augustus Grote also shared this view. A secular agnostic and an advocate, like Edwards, of natural selection, he nevertheless hoped to salvage the emotional side of religion and often proclaimed the artistic rewards of studying moths. He would have heatedly disputed Adolf Werneburg’s belief that the “most beautiful” lepidoptera are “those that fly by day.” The ornate wing scales, especially on moths, Grote observed, possessed more diverse “soft and delicate colors and patterns” than even the “gaudy day flies,” more than any artist could possibly desire.101 “Entomology,” he observed, “has its aesthetic side, although we are aware that the beauty is not in the object itself, but in the effect which we perceive in it. This is one of the enchanting deceptions of a world we none of us can really understand, though most of us believe that we have understood it, and many even that they have succeeded in it.”102 The beauty, Grote seemed to be saying, is in us, and because of that, we see it in the butterflies. Grote came close to a position held by his contemporary George Santayana (and by Santayana’s teacher William James), who claimed that the presence, or reality, of nature’s “ornaments” related to something within human beings, something at the core of the subconscious self that expressed itself as something “out there,” not only as a protection from enemies or as serving any utilitarian aim, nor as traceable to Scudder’s “eternal divine force,” but simply as beauty, the thing itself. All we need do, Santayana suggested, is open to the subjective, emotional side of our own being, and it will happen—we will see the beauty of the world.

  The butterfly science of the 1880s was a fascinating mixture of scientific confidence and human longing. Scudder, Grote, Strecker, and Edwards all saw aesthetics as bettering civilization, as beneficial to science, as something meant to satisfy or meet human needs, not necessarily only as a consequence of natural selection. An ally of science, not its competitor or usurper, beauty drew Americans to lepidoptera, setting them on paths to lifetime fulfillment.

  The natural history of Scudder, Edwards, Grote, and Strecker formed a high point to a remarkable moment when, through the lens of the butterfly, many Americans became aware of all the shapes, colors, patterns, and surfaces around them that nature was capable of creating, the existing species and genera, real or mimicked, solitary or communal, the variations, dimorphisms and polymorphisms, the emergent new organisms struggling for identity and stability, in a kaleidoscope of ever-changing relationships revealed to Americans, in part, by the Darwinian revolution and, in part, by their own eyes. This experience would grow over the years, as a result of the impact of two other major changes. First, Americans would come to know not only their own butterflies but those of the rest of the world as well, a change due to the commercial expansion of the country and by its entrance onto the world stage as an imperialist power. A new breed of collector would appear, first in England and Germany, then in the United States, influenced by Otto Staudinger of Dresden, who, after 1885, expanded his collecting empire far beyond anything that had existed earlier when he began selling lepidoptera. The leading American collector would be the tragic Will Doherty, who brought the butterflies home, as it were, feeding the enormous collections of tropical and exotic species in the United States. At the same time, Strecker would come into his own as a butterfly man, embracing completely the joys of tropical butterflies and moths and serving as a portal through which such insects would pass into the hands of numerous Americans, poor and rich alike, thereby helping to transform their approach to the natural world and to life. William Holland, a wealthy Pittsburgh minister, would also be changed (and charged) by this new climate, shifting his collecting zeal almost wholly to nonnative butterflies and inspiring others to do so. At the end of the century, he had amassed a huge collection and become the director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the most advanced such American museum of the age, a model for all the others, founded and funded by Andrew Carnegie, America’s greatest steel magnate, builder of steel rails for railroads.

  The second major change of the times was the industrialization of the country, which brought with it the production of an artifactual diversity and an aesthetic power nearly equal to that of the natural world. Industrialization helped change or redefine the way Americans viewed the whole of the natural world. This was an extraordinary moment: beauty of a natural kind appearing in tandem with beauty of an artificial kind, each competing for dominion over the American soul.

  Part Two

  ENCOUNTERS WITH THE BUTTERFLIES OF THE WORLD

  SIX

  In
the Wake of Empire

  Before 1875, the market for butterflies in the West was essentially a domestic affair. To be sure, many affluent collectors bought tropical species and composed influential books about them, among them Dru Drury and William Hewitson in England, and Jean Baptiste Boisduval in France. Poorer collectors, too, such as the actor Henry Edwards and the stonecutter Herman Strecker, in America, turned to whatever means they could—some perhaps unscrupulous—to procure exotics. Yet despite this trend, most people collected only native insects. In Germany, according to a dealer from Ebensfeld, the “love of exotic butterflies was very insignificant, with most collectors looking with contempt upon every insect not born within the bounds of our continent.”1 For the British, even the European butterfly was beyond the pale. “No one in England would care for a general collection of European Lepidoptera! Were the specimens all truly British, it would sell well!” wrote one English expert in 1872 to the German butterfly authority Otto Staudinger.2 Americans, too, had these tendencies. “The world is full of beautiful butterflies, but those that fly at home are the best,” said Augustus Grote. Theodore Mead told Henry Edwards simply, “I give preference, of course, to our native insects.”3 Even those who could have collected abroad confronted a world closed to strangers, with the Asian subcontinent beyond the reach of most naturalists, China cut off except for the port city of Canton, and sub-Saharan Africa “just a series of coasts,” the interior untouched by Westerners, its “vastness never entomologically explored.”4