Butterfly People

by William R. Leach

  The finest American butterfly man of them all, William Henry Edwards, kept a news clipping in his entomological diary about Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire, an admired French linguist and statesman who, in his ninetieth year, wrote: “I understand nothing but work, and if anybody wishes to attain my age, he must never cease working, and abandon the idea of even retiring from labor. Work! Work! That should be the motto of everybody who desires the welfare of his country and himself.”120 Edwards himself was in his mid-seventies when he delivered up volume 3 of his Butterflies of North America to Houghton, Mifflin, and soon after he felt the itch again for yet another volume, despite what would be its inevitable financial burden. He fantasized that some magnate would throw money at his feet for a “supplementary volume,” and wrote Wright that if he could get his hands on “a guaranteed fund of $1100 I would begin again. I was 75 a short time ago, but my health is good, and I have a good chance of 5 years more.”121 Some friends, in fact, led by Henry Lyman in Canada, had already started a campaign to find him funding.122 He told Wright to go out and “get the eggs of Ivallda” (an alpine satyr) “that the species might be done on plate.”123

  But nothing happened; no major groundswell of support materialized. Even his family appears to have lost interest in backing him in a new venture. His wife, Catherine, was nearly an invalid; Theodore Mead, up to his eyeballs in orchids and caladiums and following a route that Edwards’s son had helped chart, seldom talked of butterflies anymore; and Willie himself had a far greater desire to dig up oil and gas than chase insects. In 1905 Edwards wrote Wright, “It occurs to me that it might be well if I returned to you all your letters to me. When I depart, these will be unheeded by my heirs. Whereas they would remind you of much you have now forgotten.” He mentioned that he “had all the letters Bruce ever wrote me, as big as yours. I wish I could put them in a safe place.”124 But he never did mail back the many hundreds of Wright’s letters; nor did he keep Bruce’s safe. So, as he’d predicted—since he took no legal steps to prevent it (but why, one might ask, did he fail to act?)—his heirs threw most of the letters away, keeping only the choicest, with an eye to those written by such luminaries as Darwin and Wallace, along with a tiny “representative” selection from the many thousands Edwards had received over nearly seventy-five years. Had his family kept them all, they would have retained a precious archive, one surpassing in size both Scudder’s and Strecker’s.

  Still, Edwards hadn’t stopped working—how could he? He got up a long, if tedious, genealogy of his family, which anyone with a “lesser” lineage might not have bothered to finish. It opened with the epigram “The glory of children are their fathers,” something we might well dispute, while still recognizing the historical truth behind it: that those born with much often get much.125 William chose to relate Jonathan Edwards’s biography entirely in the words of others, having probably no desire to disparage his own relative in print. But why did he leave so much paternal “glory” unreflected on? Why did he refuse to examine his phylogenetic tree the way he had done the butterflies, in pursuit of a core thread in his identity? Had he ever read his relative’s “Beauty of the World” with any objectivity? Had he read it at all? By 1900 he had finished writing, of all things, a biography of William Shakespeare, which he called Shaksper Not Shakespeare. He’d been researching the book since the late 1880s, partly out of attachment to Henry Edwards, and meant to prove that William Shakespeare had not written the plays. (Mark Twain thought the same, and scholars debate it today.) His thesis rested on a mountain of poorly digested secondary reading and had little of the elegance of Edwards’s prose on the life and death of butterflies. Still, Edwards’s own voice unexpectedly breaks in, as when he observes, in a passage critical of Shakespeare’s supposed love of money over art, that “the passion for money-making is antagonistic to the passion for study. The two cannot exist in the same mind. A man may become rich as a result of his passion for literature, but he cannot become learned by study, or distinguished in literature, when money-making has been the first object.”126

  In April 1901, Edwards told Scudder, “I have let the butterflies fly since the end of my Volume.” But it would be a mistake to take these words too literally.127 He never forsook the thing he had lived with and suffered for throughout much of the nineteenth century, lost in it as much as Jonathan Edwards had been absorbed in the mysteries of God. In 1899, a year after his volume 3 had appeared, he had received some “superb” satyr larvae from David Bruce and had set to thinking about them. “You know I have the larvae of that up to three molts inclusive,” he wrote Wright in November. “I have so many species of rare larvae to figure” and “could go to sixty plates completely, if I had the money.” He dwelled on the Nokomis fritillary—or, in his preferred Latin, Argynnis nokomis—one of America’s most handsome dimorphic insects and almost equal in its beauty to Diana, Nokomis meaning “daughter of the moon” and named by Edwards in 1862, after Hiawatha’s grandmother in Longfellow’s poem The Song of Hiawatha. Flying in the American West rather than in the East where Diana flies, the female Nokomis is black with white-yellow toward the margins of both wings, the male consumed almost entirely by orange. The 1871 plate by Peart and Bowen of the butterfly, male and female, in volume 1 of The Butterflies of North America still glows radiantly on the page. In 1904, Edwards reported to Wright on an article he’d read in Scribner’s on exploration in southern Utah: “Years ago, Neumoegen had a large invoice of Argynnis Nokomis sent him, he said, by a Mormon from there. From the description of the region in this Magazine, I am sure the specimens came from those wild mountains.” And again, three weeks later, and five years before he died, “just where did Neumoegen’s Argynnis Nokomis come from? If the district could be located, I might send some man to this region.” “I wish it were in my power to go.”128 Edwards carried within him the tension at the heart of the American experience, from the colonial period onward, between extraction and adoration, artifactual beauty and natural beauty, commerce and science, and here the weight of the tension seemed to fall—as it did for nearly all of America’s leading butterfly people—toward adoration, natural beauty, and science. At the end of the railroad, such wonderful creatures, nurtured within the purposeless, chaotic density of nature, flying freely and wildly.

  Acknowledgments

  More people assisted me on this book than on any of my previous books. The lepidopterists were generous with me, forgiving, I like to think, of someone with no formal instruction in insects whom they probably at first believed knew more about butterflies than I actually did. My first encounter with a modern-day butterfly man occurred in early spring of 1999 when I interviewed the late Nicholas Shoumatoff at his home in Bedford, New York. Shoumatoff was an authority on Palearctic butterflies and a nephew of Andrey Avinoff, émigré butterfly man from czarist Russia, a talented painter, and William Holland’s choice to succeed him as curator of lepidoptera at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. Exemplary of the blend of art and science, Avinoff’s sensuous watercolors were hung all over the walls of Shoumatoff’s household. Shoumatoff wasn’t put off by my ignorance of Lord Rothschild or of Rothschild’s estate, Tring (which I had never heard of), nor by my uninformed judgment that all the influential American butterfly people must have come from upper-class backgrounds. He showed me the remnants of his small 1940s collection, with species from the Bedford area, crowned by one of the last regal fritillaries caught in the region, its wet habitat demolished by development. It was the regal’s demise in the East that persuaded Shoumatoff to trade in his butterfly net for binoculars. I owe a good deal to him, not least his advice that I visit the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and meet John Rawlins, curator of invertebrate zoology, advice that led to research that would last for another twelve years.

  Born on an isolated sheep ranch in eastern Oregon, and blessed with tremendous energy and a childlike devotion to the natural world, John Rawlins initiated me into the wonders of natural history and of butterfly syst
ematics. I could not have wished for a more inspiring guide. After Rawlins, I had the good fortune to meet, in one way or another, many fine naturalists and entomologists—David Grimaldi, Kurt Johnson, Mark Epstein, Carla Penz, and Philip DeVries. DeVries, an impressive butterfly man with feet squarely planted in the natural history tradition, graciously guided me, in particular, down the right roads, never failing to answer my queries in a timely and complete way; I learned a lot directly from him and from his eloquent two-volume field guide, The Butterflies of Costa Rica and Their Natural History. Early on in my work at the American Museum of Natural History, I came to know Eric Quinter, moth-obsessed lepidopterist at the museum. Born in eastern Pennsylvania near Strecker’s Reading, in the midst of what was a flourishing community of family farms, Quinter took pleasure in a world of insects that seemed to bloom all around him; at frequent lunches in a nearby Chinese restaurant, he answered my questions and educated me about the mysteries of the life cycle of moths, with special and original understanding of the impact of artificial light on their behavior. As acting curator, he got me passage into the rich (but cramped) entomological library on the museum’s fourth floor, now absorbed into the museum’s special collections.

  In 2005, on a research trip to London’s grand natural history museum, I met in the entomological library Bernard d’Abrera, world-renowned expert on tropical butterflies and a man of visceral intensity. He helped me discard a claim made by Will Doherty that Otto Staudinger was Jewish. “How could he have been Jewish?” reacted d’Breara with dismay. “If he had been, he wouldn’t have been buried in a Prussian cemetery.” Known for his contempt for political correctness as well as for a fearless disdain of Darwinian thinking (“all the evidence,” he has written, “points to the fixism or stasis of species in their morphology and behavior, as long as their gene pool and environment have not been destroyed”), d’Abrera made an unforgettable impact on me, one enlivened by a wonderful e-mail he later sent me summarizing the history of natural history. I regret seeing him only briefly.

  I would like to thank Carol Sheppard, entomology professor at Washington State University, who happily shared her knowledge of Benjamin Walsh; Jason Weintraub, insect collections manager at the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, who told me about Titian Peale’s early collection boxes and about the diversity of birdwing butterflies; Krishnamegh Kunte, scientist at the National Center for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru, India, who sent me in-depth e-mails about the traditional Indian approach to butterflies and about how fundamentally it differed from the Western approach; and Andrew Rindsburg, conchologist and archivist at the Alabama Museum of Natural History in Tuscaloosa, who helped me investigate the papers of Herbert Huntingon Smith and, later, thoughtfully e-mailed me much information about Smith. I am grateful to entomologist Louis Sorkin, at the American Museum of Natural History, for giving me access to the papers of the New York Entomological Society, housed at the museum; to Jackie Miller and the late Lee Miller, for allowing me to do research at the Allyn Museum in Sarasota, Florida; and to John V. Calhoun of Palm Harbor, Florida, for kindly sharing with me an unpublished diary of Theodore Mead and for spotting numerous errors in the text.

  I would like to acknowledge the late Tom Allen. Allen was a research biologist for the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources, author of a fine guidebook, The Butterflies of West Virginia and Their Caterpillars (1997), and a skilled visual artist. In the summer of 2002, he drove me around in his jeep to many of William Henry Edwards’s old collecting grounds, most unchanged except for the trails often disgraced by garbage or, even worse, the top of a mountain near Edwards’s home decapitated by strip mining (the kind of mining Edwards did not do). My visit was made memorable by Allen’s acid commentary and by watching him search for the tiny eggs of zebra swallowtails from beneath the leaves of the pawpaw bushes and rejoice at capturing a rare golden-banded skipper as we walked along a creek bed.

  In the summer of 2003 I had my first significant interview with the late Charles Remington, co-founder of the modern Lepidopterist Society in 1948, exponent of evolutionary ecology, and a much-admired teacher of entomology at Yale University. Remington expressed his lifetime admiration for Samuel Scudder and William Henry Edwards (whose volumes stared at us from across the room as we spoke) as well as for the whole natural history tradition, which, as he well knew, formed the bedrock of all modern work on butterflies. In 1947, he helped to create (and to edit) Lepidopterist News, still the central organ for butterfly people today; he insisted from the start that it contain lively little biographies of early lepidopterists as a reminder to modern ones of what they owed the past. Remington encouraged “American amateur lepidopterists,” especially, to “pursue a line of work right at hand, which does not require an extensive library or high-priced equipment. This line of work is life history studies.”

  Remington spoke to me glowingly about his students, such as Larry Gall, curatorial affiliate in entomology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, and one of the two lepidopterists I asked to read this book in manuscript form. I met Gall thirteen years ago at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, when both of us were doing research, he on the noctuid moths of Augustus Radcliffe Grote, many of which the museum owned. John Rawlins introduced us, and, at lunch, Gall told us of how he climbed up lampposts or “beat the bushes” to capture specimens. Later he became a president of the Lepidopterist Society. I thank him for his splendid effort, above all for uncovering a legion of errors in nomenclature.

  The other expert I relied on was Arthur Shapiro, professor of evolution and ecology at the University of Calfornia, Davis. Like Eric Quinter, Shapiro grew up in Pennsylvania, scouring as a boy the woodlots and fields northwest of Philadelphia or in that region of the Piedmont Plateau marked by dairy and general farming throughout. But he also collected in railroad yards, along railroad tracks, and in the marshes near the Philadelphia International Airport. “I was immensely fortunate to have grown up where the city ended and the country began,” he told me. I first came to know of him after reading his lyrical little book, New York City’s Last Frontier (1972), on the natural history of Staten Island, still a fresh and moving depiction of an ecology suffering irreversible decline; later, after migrating to California, Shapiro wrote beautifully on the butterflies of that state, studying especially those conditions that had caused the gradual decimation of many species. His 2007 field guide, distinguished by his well-crafted prose and by the original handmade illustrations by Timothy Manolis, mixes science with art in such a way as to recall the finest natural history of the past. Shapiro delivered to me fifteen single-spaced pages on everything from the tiniest Latinate blunders to mistakes of knowledge and judgment. His nearly pitiless directness sometimes winded me. But I still return to those pages, as I do to many of his other e-mails to me, for their warnings and insights, and for their assured guidance regarding new lines of inquiry.

  Shapiro also introduced me to the work of Adolph Portmann, a mid-twentieth-century Swiss biologist whose eloquent discussion of the diversity of natural organisms, their forms, shapes, colors, sizes, and patterns, articulated in his 1952 book, Animal Forms and Patterns, helped me understand better the impact of such diversity on Americans after the Civil War. His views also made clearer to me the historical significance of Samuel Scudder’s ideas. Portmann took a position very similar to Scudder’s. He accepted completely the explanatory validity of natural selection, but, at the same time, he believed that “developments in the production” of animal form go “far beyond anything which can be understood as adaptations to special conditions of life, such as better equipment in the struggle for existence.” “The scales of butterflies give the appearance of metal, of gold and blue textures, whose sense surpasses any merely adaptive ability.” “All around us are forms of life, small or large, in which have been realized other possibilities of existence than those found in our own lives.”

  To Arthur Shapiro—and to all the other lepidopterists who helped
me—I can only apologize for the mistakes of fact and interpretation that doubtless still remain in the book.

  Archivists from across the country and Europe also gave me generous assistance in my research. Pamela Henson, director of the Institutional Division of the Smithsonian Institution Archives in Washington, D.C., stands out as an invaluable guide of much distinction, an expert on the history of natural history, and an authority on the intellectual careers of John and Anna Comstock. Henson helped me find whatever of value the Smithsonian contained relating to the history of butterfly people; at lunches or on coffee breaks over many years, she conveyed the ins and outs of research in Washington and urged me to participate in the academic life of the natural sciences. I would like to thank as well the archivists at the following places: the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, California; the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Boston Museum of Science, Boston, Massachusetts; the University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut; the Natural History Museum, London, England; the Hildesheim Museum, Hildesheim, Germany; the Museum für Naturkunde, at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany; the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal, Cincinnati, Ohio; the Cincinnati Historical Society, Cincinnati, Ohio; Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois; the Mathematics and Science Library, Columbia University, New York, New York; the Putnam Museum of History and Natural Science, Davenport, Iowa; the Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas; the Special Collections and Archives, W. E. B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Morris County Historical Society, Morristown, New Jersey; the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; the Buffalo Museum of Science, Buffalo, New York; Rare Books and Manuscripts Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, New York; University Archives, Baylor University, Waco, Texas; Department of Archives and Special Collections, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida; and the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences, Staten Island, New York.