Butterfly People

by William R. Leach

  The era of economic entomology, ushered in by the new industrial agriculture, resembled, in its paradoxical effects, electrical lights, railroads, and photography. On the one hand, in giving well-paid employment for the first time to many naturalists, it bestowed a great boon. On the other hand, it reinforced profoundly the utilitarian thrust of American natural science, weakening the purely scientific side, which could not compete as a job creator, and squeezing out its aesthetic aspects. Scudder, Edwards, Doherty, and individuals like them never worked this new vein. Grote and Strecker did dabble in it, and Grote tried, without success, to get a job in it to support his family, even though he abhorred chemical pesticides and disliked the entire utilitarian bias; his favorite moth family was the Noctuidae because it had no “particular economic importance.” “There are plenty of [noctuids],” he wrote, “to reward the labors of the collector, and to puzzle the philosophers who believe that everything has its use, and that man himself is the pivot about which all creation turns.”102

  In 1879, when Strecker consented to speak in defense of insect control before the Pennsylvania Fruit Growers’ Association, he started off well enough, lamenting “the butterfly foes my horticultural friends are compelled to do battle with” and advising the use of ichneumon flies to “lessen the numbers of the worms of the cabbage butterfly.” But then, unexpectedly, he wandered off on the “glorious beauty of butterflies,” “wonderful for their diversity,” telling two stories calculated to offend his audience. In the first, he reminisced about an old farmer who, on seeing a young Strecker chasing insects in a field near Reading, shouted out in dismay against him. “The most difficult part to make the old gentleman comprehend,” Strecker related, “was what the things could be used for after they were caught.” In a second story, Strecker recounted a visit to Philadelphia’s Academy of Sciences, where he had spotted a picture of a rare butterfly drawn from a recently captured specimen. “I thought, someone else has had the luck to get that wonderful thing; I don’t suppose I’ll ever be so fortunate.” Too tired and depressed to return to Reading, he decided to search out an old friend, who, as it turned out, actually owned that butterfly. Moved by Strecker’s enthusiasm, he gave it to him. “And now that wonderful insect is one of the choicest adornments of my cabinet.” “I thought of clairvoyance, of second sight, and of more things than are dreamed of in our philosophy.” Some of the farmers must have asked themselves why Strecker was on the dais. Who, for God’s sake, had invited him?103

  In the end, the farmers had the last laugh, for the tide was fast turning against Strecker and other maniacs like him, as economic priorities reinforced entrenched utilitarian approaches to nature. In 1881, Henry Edwards innocently published, as the very first article in Papilio, a speech by Joseph Lintner in praise of applied entomology. Lintner noted how the subject has “assumed an importance in this country far greater than in any other part of the world.”104 By the 1890s, whole columns, sometimes many pages long, on economic entomology consumed space in Entomologica Americana and Entomological News. In 1897, Henry Skinner swore, in Entomological News, that his journal was “guided entirely by unselfish love for our interesting study and [has] no other motive for existence,” yet its “Department of Economic Entomology” occupied four pages, more than was devoted to any other subject.105

  A new wave of amateur activity counteracted these changes, but from a position of historical weakness and in a way that marginalized the amateur. Samuel Scudder, despite his professional training, usually worked and studied at home, and he wrote his books on butterflies in a manner well beyond the century’s tedious specialized taxonomy. His three-volume Butterflies of the Eastern U.S. and Canada was full of readable and insightful essays, to say nothing of poetry and pictures. Strecker’s early work, too, had occasional powerful eloquence, with its artful hand-colored lithographs and engrossing assaults on the practices of others. Grote pursued the same sort of entomology to the end of his life, veering off as he pleased into philosophical reflection, poetry, and thoughts on beauty.

  But by 1900, as economic entomology and laboratory-based science made their claim, the science of the early pioneers was frowned on as inferior, the mark of amateurs, a subject of ridicule. The Canadian James Fletcher, at an 1893 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, overheard a conversation indicating that what William Henry Edwards did at his home in Coalburgh, West Virginia, “was not science”—a thought inconceivable in 1880, when John Lubbock, one of England’s most respected naturalists and an amateur to boot, had singled out Edwards as one of the best natural scientists of the age. Fletcher, himself without professional training, considered the new entomology “stupid” and admired natural history’s emphasis on “seeing” and “looking.” “I retorted,” he told Scudder of the AAAS conversation, “that they did not know what science was, and that my idea was simply, accurate observation.”106 Even Charles Darwin was being stigmatized as a mere amateur, some scorning him for doing science in his country house and not in a laboratory. They might have scorned August Weismann as well, a consummate scientist who, as a young man in 1860s, conducted his brilliant cold experiments on butterflies under conditions even more primitive than Edwards knew. “Unfortunately, I did not have a zoological institute then, not even a place where I could install an ice box,” Weismann said. “I had to ask the proprietor of the Zähringerhof [a local hotel] whether I could place a case of the pupae in the hotel ice box, not a perfect arrangement, since I could not really record the temperature, much less manipulate it as I needed.”107 Weismann was an amateur of the highest order. So were “Wallace, Bates, Edwards, and Scudder,” who “all pursued Natural History for the true love of it,” wrote Fordyce Grinnell, a respected entomologist who, in Los Angeles in 1916, founded the Lorquin Society. “Thus,” he added, “their collections have come to be called by some ‘sentimental junk.’ ”108

  Henry Bird, a young carpenter and part-time farmer from Rye, New York, and a specialist in the genus Papaipema, a group of pretty noctuid moths, learned his craft at the feet of the rivals Strecker and Grote. He felt warmly toward both and, in a 1911 letter to a friend, protested that “the relation among entomologists is changing from what it was some years ago. The numerous young men coming into the ranks through the various experiment stations are specially trained, have degrees, and naturally feel of a different caliber from the common collector—the fellow who gives a few hours outside business pursuits to the study. And they do not always clothe their contempt or opinions with much of a covering of gentility. So the young collector often feels there is little or nothing for him to do aside from the mere pleasure of making a collection, whereas there is everything to do, if one does not undertake to do too much.”109

  Meanwhile, Charles Valentine Riley and his successors were turning natural history into a killing machine, wrenching it away from its ecological and aesthetic-oriented roots.110 They may have helped make America the greatest agricultural producer in the world, delivering more jobs to naturalists than, in the 1870s, they could have possibly imagined, but they transformed entomology into a bureaucratic business and validated for the young “schemes to slaughter insects wholesale and otherwise,” to quote Henry Bird again. For the rest of his life, Bird would continue to complain of the economic entomologists who had persuaded the public to detest what he loved.111

  If Bird had read Santayana’s Sense of Beauty, he would have understood, should he have needed any proof, the way beauty—the beauty of the Papaipema—drew him to nature and to the work of understanding it. Recognition of beauty had probably done more than anything to deepen the human attachment to butterflies and to the nature they inhabited. It was in the interest of natural science, therefore, to remain aware of it, sensitive to it, steeped in it, whether as something to understand for its own sake (what is natural beauty?) or as a humanizing force or presence, a counterweight or antidote to an analytical science that reduced animals to pieces or parts or particles—a process, indeed
, very often indisputably beneficial to human purposes but, on its own, degrading for humans and animals. And what did it mean for butterflies and moths, among the most stunning of nature’s creatures, to be stripped of their finest glory? Grote, Edwards, Scudder, and even Strecker practiced analytical natural science, but they remained wedded to natural beauty, for what it meant and for how it embellished human experience. The growth of economic entomology and of laboratory science, and the increasing preoccupation with mere taxonomy, broke the connection between beauty and science that natural history had tied together. The result was to leave science to the professionals, and the beauty of nature to the amateurs—and to the commercial market, the bauble stores, and the spectacle theater.

  The destruction of the family hybrid farm landscape, with its unplanned provision for butterflies and other living things, did not happen overnight; nor was industrial agriculture its only cause. Another was the formation of America’s earliest suburbs. Right up to the early 1890s, hundreds of small market farms in Brooklyn fed the people of Manhattan; in this landscape, Brooklynites hunted butterflies and moths, and out of it arose the New York and Brooklyn Entomological Societies. Naturalists like George Hulst could collect moths, as late as the 1870s, along Flatbush’s wooded paths, and in the area’s glens and hidden recesses, Fred Tepper stumbled upon many beautiful catocalas.112 By 1905, all the market farms were gone, not because they were unproductive (they weren’t) but because their owners had sold them off to real estate developers, as many thousands of New Yorkers left crowded Manhattan in quest of better housing, an outward migration accelerated by the railroads and by Brooklyn’s merger into New York City in 1898, which sent land values zooming, fostering sell-offs. The ecological result was the elimination of both hybrid and wild nature, forcing butterfly people to look for hunting grounds farther out, on the margins of eastern Brooklyn, and then into the Long Island prairie and then, even farther out, until—with the opening up and expansion of the highway system on Long Island, followed by aggressive suburbanization—there was no place else to look.113

  For well over a hundred years, nature, for many Americans, had been almost synonymous with farming and country life, meadows, glens, pastures, and woodlands all shaped by human hands. To abandon family farming seemed to mean abandoning nature, because no other activity—however draining or exhausting to the human spirit—had proved so effective in bringing human beings, day and night, into relationship with living things. Anna Botsworth Comstock, a pioneer of the American nature-study movement, feared the impoverishment of the senses as people left farms, and she advocated nature study as a way to reawaken the bond and to revive an experience on the brink of dying. “Nature-study,” she wrote in 1905, “is the effort to make the individual use his senses instead of losing them. Eyes open, ears open, and heart open is all that nature, the teacher, requires of her pupils, and in return she will reveal to them the marvels of life, the riches of the world, and the beauty of the universe.”114 See, touch, smell, and feel. “What moves in the grass I love—the dead will not lie still,” the poet Theodore Roethke would later write. “Things throw light on things, and all the stones have wings.”115

  EIGHT

  Death of the Butterfly People

  Of the butterfly people who served William Henry Edwards, arthritic and leathery seventy-year-old David Bruce collapsed first, in the woods on a fall morning in 1903, after starting out apparently fit as a fiddle, on a hunting trip from Brockport to Lake Ontario. “We lost a fine butterfly collector then,” Edwards lamented to William Wright, who would meet his own end at eighty-three in San Bernardino in 1912, six years after finishing The Butterflies of the West Coast, with his lively colored, if not always accurate, illustrations.1 After the Canadian Railroad Company fired him from his job in 1899, Thomas Bean, self-sacrificing and shy and indifferent to wealth, headed back to Galena, Ohio, putting all forty-six boxes of his butterflies into a railcar and riding in the car himself, eating and sleeping on the floor, to protect his wards from harm.2 He came home to care for his mother, and then for a sister who was “never entirely well.” He discouraged visits from naturalists who sought him out in Ohio to learn about alpine butterflies, protesting that his “house is inconveniently small.”3 In 1930, he was working as a gardener for a local high school; two years later, at eighty-six, he was dead.

  As of 1904, Mary Peart lived at 113 North Woodstock Street in Philadelphia and was still busy as an artist, “in need of all the money she can get,” Edwards informed Holland, after suggesting that he buy Peart’s larval drawings. (“They are too beautiful to be lost sight of,” Edwards wrote Scudder in 1901.)4 Holland refused. For thirty years Edwards had depended on the skill of Mary Peart to enhance his books. Often ill and sometimes down-and-out, she nevertheless stuck by him in hard times, determined to be among Edwards’s “immortals.” In the late 1880s and early 1890s, she and Edwards faced an unwelcome challenge. Both Lydia Bowen and her sister, Mrs. Leslie, after serving as Edwards’s expert colorists for many years, succumbed to age, leaving Peart, especially, without their insight and companionship. But Edwards, too, was dispirited, for almost as much as he had feared losing Peart, Edwards had feared losing these women, who shared a flat in Philadelphia, having long outlived their husbands. They had no servants, and Mrs. Leslie did all the housework, something Edwards hated, since it often delayed the butterfly plates. As early as 1885, Bowen was strong enough only to give advice to her sister on how to make colors; before then she herself had done most of the coloring, an “expert artist,” working hard all her adult life.5 In 1888, nearing eighty, she died, and Mrs. Leslie, at seventy, inherited the full burden of the work. She is “my best colorist,” Edwards said. “When I lose [her], I shall feel it very badly.”6 For a time after her death, Edwards turned to the Philadelphia firms Scudder had used for his coloring, and, almost against his will, he found himself reliant on the talents of a German-American, Edward Ketterer, who, though undisciplined and often drunk, did all the work “on the stone” for volume 3, save for two brilliantly rendered species by Mary Peart, the Rocky Mountain parnassian (Parnassius smintheus) and an arctic butterfly, Chionobas varuna.7

  Peart, however, not only did some of the coloring herself but drew the early stages of all the species in volume 3 with the finest degree of accuracy, which Ketterer later lithographed. In 1892, Edwards wrote Scudder, “Mrs. Peart has access to [a] $1500 [solar] microscope in Philadelphia, and she is eyes for me. I would stop tomorrow if I had not her aid. She is everything.”8 Her knowledge of the biology of butterflies grew in tandem, as Edwards noted repeatedly in his descriptions throughout volume 3. By 1898, she had completed more than twenty-five-hundred plates, “the beauty and precision of which,” Edwards observed, “it has not been possible to copy on the lithographic stone.” Karl Jordan and Walter Rothschild, vanguard butterfly men, agreed with Edwards: “We have no work in England or in Europe,” they observed in 1906, “in which the life history of butterflies is so well-illustrated.”9 In gratitude Edwards named an arctic satyr after her, Chionobas alberta peartiae, the final species depicted in the volume, a flag raised by Edwards as proof to everyone of the magnitude of his debt. “I take pleasure for naming it for my associate, Mrs. Mary Peart, without whose cooperation from the beginning these volumes would not have been in existence,” he wrote. Mary Peart died in 1917 in Philadelphia, the city of her birth. She was eighty years old.

  As for William Holland, so festive was his eightieth birthday, in 1928, that it seemed the whole transatlantic world had come to shower him with honors. Two years later, he revised his Butterfly Book in hopes of making it “the last word as to the diurnal lepidoptera of North America.” At the same time, he cut out some of his most caustic comments about competitors, amending, notably, his portrait of Herman Strecker, whose 1878 catalog, he had previously declared, “had no value to the beginner.”10 Holland struck out this sentence shortly before his death in 1932, perhaps in an attempt to leave this land as a kindly old emine
nce. He had outlasted all the leading first-generation butterfly people except Theodore Mead, who died in 1936.