Despite this bounty, he was disappointed that there were no new species. The king of African butterflies had been dethroned, he reported, “and is now as cheap as the nobility in Georgia [in Russia].” “I’m afraid Mr. Jackson got most of the conspicuous butterflies I have got here,” he told Hartert. His prospects might improve, he suggested: “Last week I reached the $60 limit and for ten days or more I have averaged over $40 a day.”85 In late September, Doherty rode the Uganda Railway four hundred miles back to Mombasa, on the coast, to mail off his “low country catch.” When he returned to his camp in early October, the rainy season had begun, canceling out any chance for butterflies or moths. Animal attacks had started, too. In a deep ravine, holding only a butterfly net, Doherty and another man, who had a rifle, fended off lions. Again and again, there were “marauding” tribes, and a drenching cold wetness so “intense” that he had to sleep “under a sheet, three blankets, my clothes, and a heavy overcoat, and my men even more, having thicker blankets.” By January 1901, Doherty had contracted scurvy, “the curse of the mountains,” and was ravaged by dysentery. Four months later, he could no longer walk, and his men carried him to the railway hospital in Nairobi. On May 25, he died. He was only forty-four years old. Doherty’s parents asked Hartert to help them “settle” Will’s estate and urged him to “find something among Will’s effects to retain in remembrance of him.” At their request, Hartert sent back Will’s traps, his gold watch, a few coins, his manuscripts, and, above all, his “notebooks,” his “Black Marias,” as he called them, written in detailed, almost indecipherable script, more priceless, perhaps, than any swallowtail, all now lost.86 Butterflies flew over his grave in Nairobi.
This map, published in Sir Charles Eliot’s The East Africa Protectorate (London: Frank Cass, 1905), shows the extent of the Uganda Railway, an imperialist road begun by the British in 1896 to move goods, men, and military supplies. In 1905, four years after Doherty died, it extended from Mombassa on the east coast to Lake Nyanza (Lake Victoria) in the interior. The road virtually created Uganda as a national entity.
Click here to view a larger version of this image.
Two years after the death of both Doherty and Strecker, Augustus Radcliffe Grote died in Hildesheim, Germany. Unlike Strecker, Grote had harnessed his demons in time to make strides in the scientific study of lepidoptera. In the beginning, he had no interest in the insects of Hildesheim or of Europe, only in “the odd ones that reminded me of home,” but as his productive energy rekindled, he began to study seriously German diurnals even more than the moths, and drew strength from American butterfly men, whom he felt certain were the best entomologists in the world.87 For every new friend Grote made across the Atlantic, he seemed to need a new enemy, especially “those he considered his rivals,” and he carried on some feuds in public as ugly and fruitless as the one he had waged with Strecker years before.88 One such person was John Smith, a moth man and Strecker’s admirer, who arrogantly scoffed at all ways to identify lepidoptera except by their genitalia, a view that Edwards—with his loyalty to larval characters—rejected, although Grote and Scudder took genitalia seriously as identifiers, as have naturalists into our own time.89 Smith needled Grote repeatedly in print, and Grote called him, off and on, a fool, a liar, an uneducated illiterate, clown who could barely write English, and, perhaps worst of all, “a classificator without ideas.” “Before long he will be at the bottom of the bay,” he pronounced to Dyar.90
Grote warmly befriended three other Americans—Henry Bird, Harrison Dyar, and John Comstock. Bird and Dyar, young and studentlike, were, ironically, as close to Strecker as to Grote, and Comstock, a mature scientist, was an inspiration to Grote himself. Bird collected moths in shallow swamps full of cardinal flowers near his house in Rye or on horseback along the banks of the Hudson, and studied Grote’s favorite family, the Noctuidae, especially the genus Gortyna—small, often exquisite, moths that, through painstaking field investigation of their life stages, beginning in 1895, he came to know better than anyone else.91 Grote wisely told Bird “not to scatter your work too much, but to stick to the Gortyna in which you have made so praiseworthy a first effort.”92 Dyar, a highly educated New Yorker who inherited a fortune, shared Grote’s love of music and philosophy and practiced the same kind of evolutionary entomology.93 Grote, turning fifty-four in 1895, assured Dyar that “there is no one I care more about or wish so well.” “I get lonely here with no one to talk to and discuss a subject with,” signing his letters, “with much love.”94 Dyar’s original research on butterfly caterpillars, enlisted to establish phylogenetic relationships among butterfly families, much influenced Grote’s own analysis.
By the late 1890s, John Comstock of Cornell University had become one of the country’s leading naturalists, beloved of countless students, his work bearing all the earmarks of both natural history and Darwinian biology as practiced by Grote, Edwards, Scudder, and others, from storytelling, collecting, and respect for beauty to systematic analysis and anthropomorphic ecology. In 1904 Comstock cowrote with his wife, Anna Botsford Comstock, How to Know the Butterflies: A Manual of the Butterflies of the Eastern United States, published by D. Appleton of New York. The manual went through many editions and perhaps did as much as Holland’s to inspire amateurs.95 The Comstocks, childless, had enormous hearts, caring for each other as they did for the students at Cornell and for the natural splendor of the surrounding environment. They so thoroughly mixed art and science in their own lives as to make the two seem one, just as they did in their book. The Comstocks’ manual was superior to anything before it, blessed with splendid color photographs and a text enlivened by stories taken from their own experiences, and as sardonic as anything ever done by Strecker. The color photographs may have been the only departure for them from the natural history tradition, with its reliance on the handcrafted, which Anna Comstock herself so ably exemplified. But they were such good photographs, crisper, brighter, the butterflies for the most part more artfully and simply arranged, than anything in Holland.
The Comstocks sketched analogies between humans and butterflies, believing them alike “in many important particulars,” and painted sensual verbal pictures of such insects as the clouded sulphurs, which hold “banquets around the mud puddles in the road in August” and look like “shining yellow blotches” that “scatter when approached into a hundred yellow butterfly fragments.” In a portrait of the “silvery blue,” a gossamer-winged butterfly whose full life history in their day was still uncharted, they took pleasure in disregarding the scientific call to demystify all natural phenomena. “There are several things in this world that it were better to know nothing about, such as a perfect passage of music or a bit of exquisite color. Both were meant to appeal to the soul through the senses, and knowledge about them is superfluous and a distracting factor. Therefore we feel a certain satisfaction in not being able to give any facts about the life history of the silvery blue. All that we know is that it bears on its wings a blue found nowhere else in the world except in the pearly spectrum of the sea-shell.”
In this book and others, John Comstock systematically analyzed butterflies, focusing on the wings, unlike Dyar and Edwards, who preferred the caterpillars, or Smith, who studied the genitalia. But not just the wings, rather the wing veins; many others in the past—beginning perhaps with Moses Harris in England and Gottlieb Herrick-Schaeffer in Germany—had relied on the veins to establish species, but Comstock saw them in terms of evolution, an unprecedented way to get at insect identity. It set him apart from all other previous wing analysts. For him, the wings bore nearly the whole weight and stress of evolution, and on them appeared “the record of the action of natural selection as upon a broad page.”96 By studying how the veins shifted, crisscrossed, converged, or narrowed to indecipherable points, one might trace descent, Comstock believed, from one group to another, and thereby classify and “represent” species by natural relationships and in “constantly branching lines.” He fashioned a system of letterin
g and numbering for the veins that allowed naturalists to see these relationships clearly; it became the standard system for entomologists deep into the twentieth century.97
Grote himself had long advocated the study of wing venation. “I published the first diagrams and plates of veins in scientific periodicals in America,” he told Dyar.98 Along with Scudder and Edwards, he had also urged the incorporation of evolutionary change into insect classification, at the same time aware of how hard it was to describe or identify organisms in this way. John Comstock’s work, bringing veins and evolution together, fortified Grote and brought him back to life, and he did everything he could to popularize it in Germany.99 Working eight-hour days nonstop, he bred insects again and, like a detective after a crook, plastered maps on the walls of his museum room, illustrating the phylogeny and ontogeny of butterflies (Comstock had done the same thing). By 1900, Grote had produced enough long articles to fill two books on the wing venation of both living and fossil butterflies, two of which displayed the first photographs of living lepidoptera ever published. Most naturalists viewed butterflies as evolving from a common stem, but that was wrong, according to Grote. Instead, two supergroups had emerged, the first, the Papilionidae, made up of the swallowtails, the parnassians, and something Grote called the Teinopalpidae, and the second, the Hesperiidae and all the rest of the butterflies (skippers, blues, and fritillaries). Each supergroup revealed different veins, indicating evolution along independent parallel lines and proving, Grote believed, that the classification of Henry Bates and Samuel Scudder, which insisted that the skippers came from the swallowtails and, therefore, should be classified as a “higher” group on the evolutionary ladder, must be rejected.100 Making use of Comstockian terms, Grote told Dyar “never to forget” that the Papilionidae are “more specialized than any of the Hesperids, in having lost the 2nd internal vein of secondaries.”101 “After all,” he wrote, “butterflies have wings, and these wings constitute a record.”102
While Scudder hated the reenthronement of the swallowtails and believed that Grote’s “innovations showed the length to which one may go in discussing classification from a single standpoint,” Edwards was happy to see the swallowtails back on top, holding their noses before the nasty skippers, the end of the line.103 Staudinger observed, in the preface to his newest catalog, that “for the retention of the Papilionidae at the beginning of the Rhopalocera, and for the arrangement of this group altogether, Grote’s recent phylogenetic studies are authoritative.”104 Dyar, ignoring Grote’s residence in Hildesheim, Germany, called him “the best lepidopterist of America, living or dead.”105
And yet for all of his seeming success, Grote remained, most of the time, victim to his never-dying resentments toward his living American detractors, wishing them all agonizing ends and wondering, “Why does the all-suffering Deity suffer John B. Smith to live?”106 Grote was blessed by a good wife and children, but he feared losing “attachments.” In 1896 he complained to Dyar about Edward Graef, his old collecting companion from his early Brooklyn days, because Graef had failed to respond promptly to a request for some moth cocoons with their attachments still on—that is, with those parts that the insects used to tether themselves in the winter to a tree branch, a door, or an eave of a house. This “attachment,” in an obvious free association, mattered a good deal to him. “You see what I want is the attachment. This is seldom preserved (also in social life, but I hope we will be exceptional!). It is shown in the Philosamia you sent me. The ideal pleasure these cocoons give me is great, for I fancy myself searching for them! I still want a promethea with attachment (in love as it were), the twig cut off.”107 Homesickness plagued Grote. “I want to get back home, but there seems no opening for me,” he wrote on the Fourth of July to William Henry Edwards. It “is very bitter to me,” he told Charles Fernald of Massachusetts, that “I will never return.” “I wish to Heaven I could get back,” Grote confessed to Dyar. “I get very blue sometimes.” But to Dyar he also reflected, in January 1896: “I never thought I would live so long on this beastly planet, only relieved by beautiful butterflies and a friendship such as yours.”108 And three years later, he reported how a living cocoon of the pale green luna moth someone had sent him from America had fulfilled its purpose: “A beautiful luna came out today, and I have been watching it for hours and imagining I was back on Staten Island.”109 His heart failed in Hildesheim in 1903.
The two Yankees died two years apart, William Henry Edwards in April 1909, at eighty-seven, after years of near perfect health, and Samuel Scudder in May 1911, at seventy-four, after years of suffering that began in 1896 with the death of his only child and best companion, Gardiner Scudder. In his mid-twenties, Gardiner had just graduated at the top of his class at Harvard Medical School when he fell seriously ill with a high fever. The doctors first diagnosed typhoid, but then decided on tuberculosis. In late September Scudder informed a young colleague that he would be unable to examine the insects he had sent, writing, “I should have stopped your sending them, if I had known what was in store for me. My son is dangerously sick and the doctors give us practically no hope of his life.” In November, in a letter to a close friend, Scudder observed that the disease was “terribly ravaging all the organs.” Gardiner died the day after Christmas. Upon hearing the news, William Henry Edwards sympathized “with all my heart,” noting, “It is cruel and hard to lose a child at any time, and just when he is old enough to enjoy life and be a comfort to his friends.”110 Father and son had been inseparable, in summer, year after year, canoeing and camping with each other for weeks at a time in the Maine woods, and, in winter, trekking as high as the alpine peak of Mount Washington in New Hampshire, when it was foolhardy.
“If I may but bear with courage what God gives me to endure, as my dear boy bore his illness,” Scudder told Lawrence Bruner, a naturalist at the University of Nebraska, “then all will be well.”111 But the emptiness was nearly unbearable, just as the loss of his wife had been twenty-five years before. The experience may have exacerbated a nerve disorder (probably Parkinson’s disease), which, over time, would shut down his mobility. “For the last year,” Scudder told Bruner in March, “I have been losing control over the muscles of my left leg, so that I halt in walking and cannot walk any long distances. So my collecting days are about over. I should only be a drag on a companion. The doctor says I am growing old in a one sided fashion, that is all! I shall be sixty next month, and I think my left leg has the growing old all to itself!” A year later his feet hurt so badly that he had trouble walking the few blocks from his home on Brattle Street to the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and a few years after that he lost sensation in his left hand and arm, making it impossible for him to pack and mail insect boxes. “My right hand is also beginning to tremble and I must soon give over handling fragile specimens,” he told Bruner.112 He took a medicine called torinol to sleep.113
Scudder’s affliction was beyond words. He lost his job as chief paleontologist in Washington, his son, and much of his ability to walk all almost at once, but if he ever pitied himself or thought God was punishing him, there is no record of him having said so. The purpose he found in natural history helped, for a time, to save him. You will do “better work for the struggle to get it,” he reassured Lawrence Bruner, a young man who, at one time, had doubted he had any ability.114 And so Scudder must have told himself, stalwart, passionate Protestant that he was. Throughout the remainder of the century, with his power to move about slowly ebbing away, he opened his home to naturalists, who often met in a big laboratory behind his house that had a door knocker shaped like a grasshopper. Heated by an enormous open fireplace and filled with books, this scientific sanctuary struck one visitor as a “mecca for every entomologist, resident or migrant, native or foreign,” and another as an “enchanted chamber wherein Scudder’s kindly spirit dominated.”115
Scudder was not only a pioneering butterfly man but the country’s principal expert on grasshoppers, and while his physical powers lasted,
he researched forty articles on grasshoppers, among them essays on cave crickets and pink grasshoppers and an account of the prayers Mexicans relied on to fend off insect plagues. A month after his son’s death, he began work on a “general guide” to the grasshoppers of North America, and shortly after that, he started a 150-page catalog on fossil beetles. At the same time he was pounding out one guidebook after another on American butterflies, derived from his magnum opus.116 In the late summer of 1900, on vacation at Prouts Neck, in Maine, he thought about the monarch butterfly, his name for that soaring orange-and-black vagrant, its life history still shrouded in mystery, and, feeling better than usual, took a short walk “on Sunday morning,” as he wrote his friend Samuel Henshaw, the director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and “came across a spot on the sunny side of a fir grove where the boughs of trees, and especially the dead ones, were covered with Plexippus, which occasionally flew up and then settled again. There were perhaps thousands of them.” “On coming home just before reaching it, I came across another lot of some hundreds in another sunny nook. Noticing yesterday that the butterflies were rather scarce about the house, I went out this morning at the same hour as Sunday and to the same spots, with the result that I saw only three there, though others were flying about, but singly.” He told Henshaw to keep a look out and perhaps he might see the same butterflies on their way southward from Prout’s Neck. “Observe whether they take any definite general direction.”117
For five or six years, Scudder could barely move his body, unable to work, or even to think clearly for long. Yet he responded warmly to his friends, who treated him with much affection. “I am sure it was you who sent me those lovely flowers,” Scudder wrote Henshaw in April 1907, “which came this afternoon without any name of sender. You place me under new and too friendly obligation all the time and make me feel I can never repay you. I am not worthy of such kindness as you always show me, but what I should do without you I don’t know.”118 In warm weather, he sat on the veranda of his Cambridge home, listening to his sister-in-law read from the newspapers or books. For nearly ten months, she exhausted every page of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, enunciating and often defining each word with the kind of studious care Scudder himself used for his own words, as living and lovely to him as butterflies. “It is one of the most pathetic facts in the history of science,” Theodore Cockerell, a Colorado naturalist, wrote soon after Scudder’s death, in May 1911, “that for seven years this great naturalist remained paralyzed and helpless, with so much of the work he had planned to do still unfinished.”119
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