Over the years I have spent many rewarding hours at the American Museum of Natural History, a truly fabulous treasury of materials bearing on the history in this book, without which there would have been no such book. During this time, Barbara Mathe, head of special collections, and Tom Baione, director of the library, gave me indispensable help for which I thank them, as did Mai Qaramen, a more recent member of the museum staff, with many of the color plates. In 2007, on my research trip to Germany, I relied on the kindness of Editha Schubert, a young archivist at the Deutsches Entomologisches Institut, Müncheberg, Germany, who brought me a cartload of documents relating to the German/American treatment of butterflies in the nineteenth century; she left me alone in her office to go through everything, and later had copied electronically a trove of letters and diary fragments drawn from this unusual, and still largely unexplored, entomological archive. Another estimable archivist was Ben Williams, who served as director of the library at the Field Museum of Natural History for nearly all the years I did research there, watching over his ward like a brooding hen. The library contains the Herman Strecker collection, unmatched in the United States as a source for studying the butterfly people of America as well as of Europe and England; Williams recognized its value and did all he could to ensure that I made the best use of it.
And then there is Bernadette G. Callery, sophisticated sleuth at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the best archivist I have ever known. From the first day I arrived at the museum in 1999 to the last time I spent with her in the summer of 2006, Callery did what the best archivists do: listened attentively to my requests, did everything within her power to understand and satisfy my research needs, and then, when I was not around, wrote me long e-mails full of useful material. Together, we came to grips with the peculiarly flawed character of William Holland, the former director of the great museum whose archives she so beautifully superintends.
Several living direct descendants of Augustus Radcliffe Grote and William Henry Edwards generously aided me in my research, as did friends, colleagues, and fellow historians. Peter and Marianne Gaethgens of Berlin, Germany, the latter the great-grandson of Grote, happily supplied me with all the relevant documents they could gather on Grote, best of all, sheet music to a march composed by Grote to celebrate the election of Grover Cleveland as mayor of Buffalo; I thank them especially for correcting a mistake I made regarding the way Grote died. The family of the late John A. Willis, descendant of William Henry Edwards, allowed me to visit Edwards’s home in Coalburgh, still standing, and still occupied to this day by Willis kin. The family was gracious, especially Douglas Willis, who, months before my journey, instructed me about archival sources on Edwards; when I arrived in Coalburgh, he and his brother, Tom, walked with me from Edwards’s house down a path across a ridge studded by pawpaw bushes to Edwards’s old 1865 coal mine, the remains of which still stood, along with the rail tracks that once carried coal by trolley down the mountainside to the tipple on the Kanawha River below.
I am grateful to Victoria Cain, Ian Miller, Barbara Fields, Lynn Nyhart, and Marsha Wright, all of whom, in one form or another, helped me complete this book. Five historians accepted my request to read the entire manuscript, and deserve my particular, and deeply felt, gratitude. Peter Dimock’s and Mary Furner’s warmly enthusiastic readings had the effect—as William Henry Edwards said of the impact of a long-awaited letter from Henry Edwards—of giving me “a sense of pleasure like that of sunshine on a bank of flowers.” Donald Worster persuaded me to make major changes in the introduction in order to create a more integrated analysis throughout the book, freeing it from the burden of ideas raised in the beginning but later never well developed; Robert Richardson urged me to rid the book of needless technical verbiage, and I hope I managed to do that; and the insightful Polly Winsor compelled me, in an extensive, marvelous e-mail and two later phone calls, to understand better the complexities of systematics and the character of natural history tradition.
I would like to thank the people at Pantheon—Jill Verrillo, for taking it on the chin when she didn’t really deserve it and for always acting professionally (even if I didn’t); Ellen Feldman, who superbly oversaw the copyediting of the book, not once, but twice, thus making the book twice-born, as it were, in the language of the American philosopher William James; Bonnie Thompson, who did awesome copyediting; and, above all, Dan Frank, my editor at Pantheon, who read whatever I put before him thoughtfully and with penetration. A wonderfully tolerant and civilized individual, Dan supported this book—and me—in a way I will never forget.
Elizabeth Blackmar and the late Jeannette Hopkins were my best allies in this often difficult, prolonged experience. Betsy, my dear partner in life, read the manuscript so many times as to nearly commit it to memory and to make it her own; to have done that was to have taken responsibility for the manuscript, and to have taken responsibility for it amounted to a refusal to accept failure, her failure, as well as mine.
Jeannette Hopkins died in August 2011, and I will miss her for the rest of my life. I relied on her to edit three of my books, written over a period of thirty years; she immersed herself in them inside and out. The first was an immense thrill for me, given what I knew about her reputation. She wielded almost total control over the manuscript, and I adopted almost everything she proposed; the manuscript sits in my attic, refugee from her relentless pen, every page covered in red ink. The second book was a harder experience, and the third the hardest of all, since she fought with me, tooth and nail, over the “gestalt” of the book, as she called it, the book’s governing concept or meaning. My struggle with her was painful, and, at one point I wanted to end the relationship, but I did not. I cannot say Jeannette had total victory, but she won where it mattered. The book is dedicated to her.
Notes
Abbreviations of Frequently Used Sources
BEUSC Samuel Scudder, The Butterflies of the Eastern United States and Canada
BNA William Henry Edwards, The Butterflies of North America
CE Canadian Entomologist
DEI Deutschen Entomologischen Institut, Müncheberg, Germany
DP Duncan Putnam Papers, Putnam Museum of History and Natural Science, Davenport, Iowa
EML Ernst Mayer Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
EN Entomological News
GF George Hazen French Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
HD Harrison Gray Dyar Papers, 1882–1927, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, DC
HE Henry Edwards Correspondence, 1882–1891, E39, American Museum of Natural History, New York, New York
HS-ANS Henry Skinner Papers, 1879–1925, Collection 920, Academy of Natural Science Archives, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
HS-FM Herman Strecker Papers, Field Museum Library and Archives, Chicago, Illinois
JL Joseph Lintner Papers, Manuscripts and Special Collections, New York State Library, Albany
JMH James Morgan Hart Papers, #14-18-65, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, New York
LB Lawrence Bruner Papers, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco
LRH Herman Strecker, Lepidoptera: Rhopaloceres et Heteroceres
MNK Museum für Naturkunde, Archives, Berlin, Germany
NHM-LONDON Natural History Museum Archives, London, England
SS-BMS Samuel Scudder Papers, Boston Museum of Science Archives, Boston, Massachusetts
TB Thomas Bean Correspondence, 1877–1879, American Museum of Natural History, New York, New York
TM Theodore Mead Papers, Department of College Archives and Special Collections, Olin Library, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida
WGW William Greenwood Wright Papers, Special Collections, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco
WH-CM, William J. Holland Papers, 1896–1925, CMNH, 1988-3, Carnegie Museum of Natur
al History Archives, 2007-5, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
WHE-SA William H. Edwards Collection, West Virginia State Archives Manuscript Collection, Charleston
WH-HSWP William Holland Family Papers, 1747–1933, Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, Senator John Heinz History Center, Pittsburgh
Introduction
1. Augustus Grote, “On the Geographical Distribution of North American Lepidoptera,” CE (September 1886): 165; for the Jonathan Edwards quote, see his sermon “Beauty of the World” (1725), in A Jonathan Edwards Reader, ed. John E. Smith et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).
2. W. L. Devereaux to Strecker, March 26, 1892, HS-FM. A farmer from upstate New York, Devereaux reflected in this letter on his youth in the 1870s, when he collected moths and butterflies.
3. On railway imperialism around the world in the nineteenth century, see Clarence B. Davis and Kenneth E. Wilburn Jr., with Ronald E. Robinson, Railway Imperialism (NewYork: Greenwood, 1991).
4. I do not wish to romanticize the farming landscape, especially in its extensive, monocultural forms, which, whenever they appeared, led to the eradication of diverse habitats, not to their creation, and, thereby, to the extinction or near extinction of many butterflies (such as the regal fritillary, baltimore checkerspot, and atlantis fritillary). Small farms had adverse impacts, too, but their effects have also been very positive. On the negatives, see Michael Gochfeld and Joanna Burger, Butterflies of New Jersey (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 180–82, 188–89.
5. This analysis is drawn largely from David R. Foster, Thoreau’s Country: Journey Through a Transformed Landscape (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). This book, mixing analysis with full quotations from Thoreau’s journals, shows wonderfully how much Thoreau’s notion of nature and “wildness” owed to the hybrid farm landscape. Foster’s work belongs to a new literature that has emerged over the past ten or so years and that builds, in part, on the views of Aldo Leopold. Leopold contended that certain kinds of farming (but not monoculture) can enrich the diversity of life, rather than reduce or destroy it. For Leopold’s position, see “The Farmer as Conservationist,” a 1939 essay republished in The River of God and Other Essays, ed. Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Callicott (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 255–65. For recent assessments, see in addition to Foster, Brian Donahue, The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 1–23,155–233. For a fine history of the evolution of farming practices in America, see Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).
6. On pasture species, see Scott L. Ellis, “Biogeography,” in Butterflies of the Rocky Mountain States, ed. Clifford D. Ferris and F. Martin Brown (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980), 17. On the monarch, see Paul Opler to Dr. Marilyn T. Vassallo, September 12, 1978, Paul A. Opler Papers, Archives, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco. Opler wrote that monarchs actually became “more abundant after the arrival of European Man on the continent since many milkweeds, the monarch’s caterpillar food, thrived in the disturbed habitats that are the products of man’s environmental manipulations.” See also Lincoln P. Brower, “Understanding and Misunderstanding the Migration of the Monarch Butterfly (Nymphalidae) in North America, 1857–1995,” Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society 49, no. 4 (1995): 304–85. On the black swallowtail and the meadow fritillary, see Gochfeld and Burger, The Butterflies of New Jersey, 122, 183; Samuel Scudder, BEUSC (Cambridge, 1889), vol. 1, p. 608; and Gary Noel Ross, “Butterflies of the Wah’Kon-Tah Prairie,” Holarctic Lepidoptera (March–September 2005): 1–30.
7. “Winged wanderers on clover sweet” appears in the poem “A Butterfly in Wall Street,” quoted by Samuel Scudder in BEUSC, vol. 1, p. 249. Scudder cites only “Sherman” as the author of the poem. For an extended description of collecting in clover, see the following from John Byrkit of Indianapolis, Indiana, to Herman Strecker, November 18, 1874, HS-FM:
The Argynnis was taken on 11th June 1871 about two miles from south of the city on a clover field about half a mile from a low swampy meadow. The surface of the field was rolling, gravelly piece of ground situated near a wood heavy set with fine red clover in a rich mass of bloom. Argynnis Cybele in numbers very fine were abundant. Colias Philodice and Pieris Protodice were also plenty. Took the same day one specimen L. Bachmanii and one specimen Thecla Halesus. I have worked hard many a day over the same ground to find more examples of the Argynnis that I might establish what I supposed to be a new species but have so far failed.
On the butterfly abundance in wilderness regions, see John Thomas Powell and Walter and Irja Knight, “A Vegetation Survey of the Butterfly Botanical Area, California,” Wasmann Journal of Biology 28, no. 1 (1970).
8. Higginson, quoted in Scudder, BEUSC, vol. 1, p. 569; Edward Doubleday, The Genera of Diurnal Lepidoptera, vol. 1 (London, 1846), 225; and Crèvecoeur, selections from Letters From an American Farmer (London, 1782), in Robert Finch and John Elder, eds., The Norton Book of Nature Writing (New York: Norton, 2002), 53–66. The historian Willis Conner Sorensen, in his fine, groundbreaking book Brethren of the Net: American Entomology, 1840–1880 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995), argues that most entomologists in the nineteenth century were not farmers and that farming, therefore, could not be listed as an explanation for why they became naturalists or lepidopterists. But Sorensen ignores the existence of the ubiquitous hybrid agrarian landscape, which all the leaders knew very well from childhood. The matter is important, given that, after 1950, this landscape was dismantled and everywhere suburbanized. See Sorensen, Brethren of the Net, chapter 8, “Profile of the American Entomological Community. About 1870,” 150–96.
9. Walt Whitman, Specimen Days and Collect (1883; rpt. New York: Dover Publications, 1995), 83, 121.
10. Herman Strecker, Butterflies and Moths of North America: Complete Synonymical Catalogue of Macrolepidoptera (Reading, PA: B. F. Owen, 1878), 9.
11. On European and English natural history, see David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [1976] 1994); and the introduction to From Natural History to the History of Nature: Readings from Buffon and His Critics, ed. John Lyon and Philip Sloan (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 1–2. See also Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); N. Jardine et al., eds., Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Stephen T. Asma, Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid: And Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Brian W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
12. Lyon and Sloan, From Natural History, 1–2.
13. On Linnaeus, see Wilfred Blount, Linnaeus: The Compleat Naturalist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), and Lisbet Koerner, “Carl Linnaeus in His Time and Place,” in Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine et al., 145–62; on Humboldt, see Jason Wilson, introduction to Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Region of the New Continent, abridged and trans. Jason Wilson (New York: Penguin, 1995), xliii; Douglas Botting, Humboldt and the Cosmos (New York: Harper & Row, 1973); and Gerard Helferich, Humboldt’s Cosmos (New York: Gotham, 2004). On Buffon, see Jacques Roger, Buffon: A Life in Natural History, trans. Sarah Lucille Bonnefoi (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); and on Darwin, see John Bowlby, Charles Darwin: A New Life (New York: Norton, 1991). Carol Kaesuk Yoon has many insightful things to say on the history of systematics in her penetrating book Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instin
ct and Science (New York: Norton, 2009). Unfortunately, I read Yoon’s book too late to make use of it here.
14. See Mary P. Winsor, “Linnaeus Was Not an Essentialist,” Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 93, no. 1 (2006): 2–7; Mary P. Winsor, “Non-essentialist Methods in Pre-Darwinian Taxonomy,” Biology and Philosophy 18 (2003): 387–400; and Staffan Muller-Wille, “Collection and Collation: Theory and Practice in Linnaean Botany,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 38, no. 3 (2007): 541–62. I would like to thank Professor Winsor for her indispensable guidance on this matter.
15. Lyon and Sloan, From Natural History, 1–2; and “Premier Discours,” in From Natural History, 101.
16. Quoted in Roger, Buffon, 329–30. See also Buffon, “Premier Discours,” in Lyon and Sloan, From Natural History, 105–23; and Roger, Buffon, 320. For a comparison of Buffon and Linnaeus, see Asma, Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads, 114–53; and Roger, Buffon, 71–92, 311–13.
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