146. Louis Agassiz, Essay on Classification (1857; repr., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962), 177–78. Edward Lurie’s introduction informs this analysis.
147. Lurie, Louis Agassiz, 186–87, 196–97, 212–17.
148. Ibid., 82–83.
149. The society published a sophisticated journal, held an extensive array of meetings and classes, and employed a knowledgeable staff; it nearly equaled in influence the existing museums, Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences, the Smithsonian, and the Museum of Comparative Zoology. For historical material on the Boston Society of Natural History, see Mary P. Winsor, Reading the Shape of Nature: Comparative Zoology at the Agassiz Museum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 10–11, 129–30; and Samuel Scudder, presidential speech, Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History 21 (1885): 15–16. “The Boston Society,” Scudder observed, “was more largely endowed than any similar institution in the country.”
150. Lurie, Louis Agassiz, 252–302; but I have taken from the whole book.
151. See Winsor, Reading the Shape of Nature, 37–38. Winsor presents a caustic, idiosyncratic, and brilliant assessment of both the Museum of Comparative Zoology and Agassiz, the best ever published. But it, too, relies heavily in places on the work of Edward Lurie. See, also, for different approaches to Agassiz, Philip J. Pauly, Biologists and the Promise of American Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 33–51; Edward J. Larson, Evolution’s Workshop (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 95–105, 122–25, and 218–19; and Rudwick, Worlds Before Adam, 437–49, 518–38. For a discussion of Agassiz’s influential predecessors—above all, Cuvier—see Stephen T. Asma, Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 114–53.
152. Lurie, Louis Agassiz, 295–97.
153. Winsor, Reading the Shape of Nature, 25.
154. Lurie, Louis Agassiz, 57.
155. Here again, I owe this interpretation to Lurie’s excellent discussion in chapter 7 of Louis Agassiz.
156. Winsor, Reading the Shape of Nature, 31–37.
157. Ibid., 12–15.
158. Lurie, Louis Agassiz, 303–17.
159. Alexander Humboldt, Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent (1804; repr., New York: Penguin, 1995), 126–30.
160. Scudder, “Perambulations in Search of an Eclipse!,” handwritten in 1860, 44–45, Samuel Scudder Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Scudder discusses his asthma on pp. 17–19. There were three versions of this trip, which took him through many Indian villages, one by Commander C. H. Davis and two by Scudder. See Davis, “Journal on the Astronomical Expedition Sent Out by Commander C. H. Davis (1860),” handwritten, Houghton Library, Harvard University (Film 03–1642). The first Scudder version was “Perambulations,” later published in a bowdlerized form (cutting out Scudder’s references to pretty Indian girls, for instance, as well as the fact that he went to church whenever he could find one, mornings and afternoons, sometimes in moccasins, to suit the Indian custom) as The Winnipeg Country; or, Roughing It with an Eclipse Party (Boston, 1886). The Winnipeg Country lacks the life and detail of the earlier version. Moreover, there is no indication that Scudder wrote it (the author is listed as “A Rochester Fellow”) or was even on the trip. Why it was published in this form is a mystery.
161. Walsh to Scudder, December 17, 1864, SS-BMS.
162. Scudder, BEUSC, vol. 1, pp. 299–300.
163. See Scudder, “Annual Meeting of the Society,” Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History 9 (May 20, 1863): 230–32.
164. Quoted by Clark A. Elliott in his Thaddeus William Harris (1795–1856) (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2008), 174–75. See also Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Memoir of T. W. Harris,” in Samuel Scudder, ed., The Entomological Correspondence of Thaddeus W. Harris (Boston, 1869), xxvi; and Harris to Edward Doubleday, August 31, 1840, in Scudder, ed., Entomological Correspondence, 147.
165. Scudder to Herman Hagen, January 22, 1866, EML.
166. For Scudder’s announcement, see American Naturalist, vol. 3, nos. 3 and 4 (May and June 1869).
167. Scudder summarized this emphasis on biology in a public address, “Recent Progress of Entomology in America,” Psyche (January-February 1878): 97–116.
168. Agassiz set the precedent, although, curiously, Scudder himself would later credit his student colleagues with the idea of focusing on the American scene. See the preface to vol. 1, BEUSC.
169. American Naturalist (June 1869): 213.
170. Scudder, BEUSC, vol 1, p. 468, and vol. 2, pp. 1007–8.
171. Gene Stratton-Porter, Moths of the Limberlost (New York: Doubleday Page, 1912), 369.
172. Scudder to Henry Edwards, April 9, 1869, HE.
173. William Henry Edwards to Scudder, October 20, 1870 (Alexandria), and August 7, 1871 (Montreux), SS-BMS.
174. Scudder to William Henry Edwards, November 5, 1871, WHE-SA; and Scudder, “Fossil Butterflies,” in Memoirs of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, vol. 1 (Salem, MA, 1875); for an account of his European experience, see p. 43. Scudder discussed his alpine trip in his The Geology of New Hampshire, vol. 1 (Concord, 1874), 343.
175. The quotes come from an essay by Augustus Grote, “On Genera and the Law of Priority,” CE (March 1876): 36–37. For definitions of lumping and splitting, see Kurt Johnson and Steve Coates, Nabokov’s Blues (Cambridge, MA: Zoland, 1999), 54, 101–2, 285–86.
176. Scudder to William Henry Edwards, November 5, 1871, WHE-SA.
177. Scudder, Historical Sketch of the Generic Names Proposed for Butterflies: A Contribution to Systematic Nomenclature (Salem, 1875), 91–96; and Scudder, Systematic Revision of Some of the American Butterflies, with Brief Notes on Those Known to Occur in Essex County, Massachusetts (from a Report of the Peabody Academy of Science, for 1871), 3–4.
178. On Hübner’s biography, see William Henry Edwards, CE 8, no. 3 (1876): 43.
179. Scudder, Butterflies: Their Structure, Changes, and Life-Histories (New York: Holt, 1881), 6–7, 54–59.
180. Scudder to William Henry Edwards, November 5, 1871, WHE-SA.
181. William Henry Edwards to Scudder, April 28, 1872, and December 20, 1870, SS-BMS.
182. Edwards to Scudder, October 6, 1871, and April 28, 1872, SS-BMS.
183. William Henry Edwards to Scudder, August 27, 1872, SS-BMS.
184. William Henry Edwards to Scudder, October 6, 1871, SS-BMS. “Nothing shows more clearly the absurdity of looking at specific differences in the imago alone,” he wrote, “than the late discoveries of Ajax and Interrog. A lot of butterflies—say from Africa—come before a lepidopterist, and he forthwith, strictly according to received practice, separates them into as many species as he can from little differences, in color, in spots. When actually it is all guess work and breeding from egg would show a dozen species in one.”
185. William Henry Edwards to Scudder, September 3, 1871, SS-BMS.
186. Scudder to William Henry Edwards, November 5, 1871, HE.
187. William Henry Edwards to Scudder March 3, 1873, HE.
188. William Henry Edwards to Scudder, January 24, 1871, and January 19 and March 3, 1873, SS-BMS.
189. William Henry Edwards to Scudder, December 24, 1870, and March 22 and April 14, 1871, SS-BMS.
190. William Henry Edwards to Scudder, June 15 and July 11, 1871, SS-BMS.
191. BNA, vol. 1, section “Argynnis XIV,” for this quotation. The volume itself is unpaginated.
192. Scudder to William Henry Edwards, November 5, 1871, HE.
193. Scudder to Strecker, announcing his coming to Reading, November 23, 1873, HS-FM.
194. On Mount Washington, club members roughed it for weeks on end, in search of crepuscular and nocturnal insects, and gathered a great deal of biological information on moths and butterflies. See the account by Joseph Lintner, in his “List of Lepidoptera,” in the
Thirtieth Report of the State Museum of Natural History (Albany, 1879): 141.
195. Scudder, “English Names of Butterflies,” Psyche 1 (May 1874): 1.
196. J. H. Behrens, “Vernacular Names for Butterflies,” CE (July 1874): 9–10; S. H. Peabody, “Mr. Scudder’s Butterflies,” CE (December 1881): 246–50; Scudder, “English Names of Butterflies.”
197. See Worster, A Passion for Nature, 185–90.
198. Scudder, quoted in “Tenth Anniversary of the Club,” Appalachia (1886): 366.
199. Scudder, “The Distribution of Insects in New Hampshire,” a chapter in The First Volume of the Final Report upon the Geology of New Hampshire (Concord, MA, 1874), 331–62.
2. The German-American Romantics
1. For an excellent overview of this immigration, see Kathleen Neils Conzen, “Germans,” in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephen Thernstrom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980), 405–25.
2. On beer and entomology, see Edward L. Graef, “Some Early Brooklyn Entomologists,” Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society 9, no. 3 (1914): 55; Charles W. Leng, “Memories of Fifty Years Ago,” Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society 18 (February 1923): 1–12; and George P. Engelhardt, “The Brooklyn and New York Entomological Societies, Past and Present,” Annals of the Entomological Society of America 22, no. 3 (1929): 392–400. See also William Bather, “Another Reminiscence of Early Days,” Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society, 18 (1923): 56–57.
3. Zimmerman, well known and admired by other American naturalists of that time especially, collected and studied American beetles. See John Morris to Thaddeus Harris, February 13, 1841, Harris Papers, EML: “Zimmerman is a strange genius with many most excellent traits of character. He is quite wealthy, and of a family rather of the higher order in Europe. I mean that he is not a plebian.” Zimmerman’s only fault, according to Morris, was that he tended to fall in love too readily, and suffered because of it, especially in relation to one young woman he met “while boarding” in a “house with the girl who refused his suit.” This experience possibly helped “send” him to South America.
4. Morris to Harris, July 22, 1839, Harris Papers, EML.
5. John Morris, Synopsis of the Described Lepidoptera of North America (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1862), vii–xvi. For a biography of Morris (but with little discussion of his butterfly work), see Michael J. Kurtz, John Gottlieb Morris: Man of God, Man of Science (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1997), 74–76, 86–91.
6. William Henry Edwards, Autobiographical Notes (privately printed, 1901), 203; and Kurtz, John Gottlieb Morris, 91.
7. I would like to thank Lawrence F. Gall of the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, Connecticut, for this information. Gall is the recognized authority on Grote’s entomological achievement.
8. Herman Strecker, LRH (Reading, PA, 1872–78), 78; and William Hewitson to Strecker, September 1873, and October 9, 1873, HS-FM.
9. Grote mentions “the progress of aesthetic entomology” in a letter to Scudder, observing at the same time that “in Germany a few study this well.” See Grote to Scudder, October 30, 1869, SS-BMS.
10. Augustus Grote, The Hawk Moths of North America, 5; and Grote, “Historical Sketches of Gortyna and Allied Genera,” CE (May 4, 1900), 70–81.
11. Augustus Grote, “Moths and Moth-Catchers: Part I,” Popular Science Monthly (June 1885): 246–52; and Hawk Moths of North America (Bremen, 1886), 5.
12. For its English application, see Corbin Scott Carnell, Bright Shadow of Reality: Spiritual Longing in C. S. Lewis (1974; repr., Cambridge, MA: Eerdmans, 1999), especially chapter 1, “Sehnsucht,” pp. 13–29.
13. See Nicholas B. Wainwright, Philadelphia in the Romantic Age of Lithography (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1958); and Jessie Poesch, Titian Ramsey Peale (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1961).
14. On the neighbors, see George Meiser, Echoes of Scholla (Reading, PA: Berksiana Foundation, 1976), 73; newspaper clipping, HS-FM. For Strecker’s self-description, see his close Reading friend, Fred Spang, to Strecker, September 22, 1869, HS-FM: “Speaking of the Devil, I believe you always considered yourself one of his favorite children, a point which I am not ready to dispute with you.” Spang invited Strecker to visit San Francisco, where Spang had recently migrated, because “you will be nearer Hell than any other place I know of.”
15. Woldemar Geffcken to Strecker, March 7 and 18, 1874, HS-FM. In a letter from James Behrens, a German lepidopterist and an immigrant to San Francisco, to Strecker, Behrens details the classic work of an exemplary artist-entomologist, Carl Julius Milde, of Lübeck, thereby giving insight into this general European practice. See Behrens to Strecker, November 19, 1875, HS-FM.
16. This information appeared in many early accounts of Strecker’s life and comes directly from his own account, curiously almost buried in a concluding section of his 1878 catalog called “List Localities.” The locality mentioned here was Kern County of California, possibly named by Frémont for the three brothers. Strecker apparently never boasted about his relation to the Kern family, whom he barely knew. See Herman Strecker, Butterflies and Moths of North America: Complete Synonymical Catalogue of Macrolepidoptera (Reading, PA: B. F. Owen, 1878), 53. On Ferdinand’s hometown and Uncle Wilhelm, see Woldemar Geffcken (of Stuttgart) to Strecker, March 18, 1874, and March 29, 1878, HS-FM. On the Kern brothers and their Romantic zeal for nature and exploration, see David J. Weber, Richard H. Kern: Expeditionary Artist in the Far Southwest, 1848–1853 (Albquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985); Robert V. Hine, Edward Kern and American Expansion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), vii-ix, 1–55; H. A. Spindt, “Notes on Life of Edward M. Kern,” Kern Historical Society (November 1939): 5–20; William Heffernan, Edward M. Kern: The Travels of an Artist-Explorer (Bakersfield, CA: Kern Historical Society, 1953). In the late 1840s, Joseph Leidy hired Richard to do the illustrations for the annual reports of the Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences, which may explain why the young Strecker got easy access to the pictures in the basement library. See Weber, Richard H. Kern, 23–24.
17. Strecker to Duncan Putnam, June 2, 1876, DP.
18. E. L. Hettinger and Milton W. Hamilton, “Dr. Herman Strecker—Artist and Scientist,” Historical Review of Berks County (July 1946): 98–102. For his own business, see letterhead, Strecker to Henry Edwards, November 9, 1870, HE.
19. Strecker to Duncan Putnam, June 10, 1876, DP.
20. Reakirt to Strecker, June 23, 1869, HS-FM: “I can thoroughly appreciate the weight of moving a marble yard, and I am glad you didn’t smash your feet again.” On his gravestones, see, for example, John H. Kendall (husband of Mary) to Strecker, February 13, 1869, HS-FM.
21. Theodore Mead to Strecker, June 5, 1873, HS-FM.
22. Joseph Drexel to Strecker, August 29 and October 18, 1867, and March 23 and September 9, 1868, HS-FM. In the 1880s, Drexel moved to New York, where he ran his banking business and served as a trustee to the American Museum of Natural History, donating his lepidoptera to that institution. See Frank Lutz, “Amateur Entomologists and the Museum,” Natural History 24, no. 3 (May–June 1924): 337.
23. On Charles Wood, see Wirt Robinson to Henry Skinner, April 20, 1908, HS-ANS. Robinson’s grandfather knew Strecker when both were boys in Reading. Wirt recalled Wood in his letter, describing the role he played. See also Charles Wood to Herman Strecker, December 14, 18, 23, and 28, 1866, HS-FM. On his father’s beating, see the interview with Strecker in Arthur Fuller’s column in Rural New York, “Daily Rural Life,” January 11, 1875, HS-FM.
24. Herman Strecker, LRH, 99. C. Amatrix is described in William Holland, The Moth Book: A Guide to the Moths of North America (1903; repr., New York: Dover, 1968), 263.
25. Strecker to Henry Edwards, December 11, 1870, HE.
26. Strecker, preface, Butterflies and Moths of North America, 2, and Alexander Humboldt, Cosmos, vol. 1 (
1850; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 82–83.
27. Strecker to Henry Edwards, August 23, 1871, and January 21, 1874, HE.
28. Paul A. Druzba, Neversink: Reading’s Other Mountain (Reading, PA: Exeter House, 2003), 12–14.
29. On the relationship between Strecker and Robinson, see Wirt Robinson to Henry Skinner, March 30 and April 20, 1908, HS-ANS.
30. Sallie Goodfellow to Louisa Roy, December 18, 1856, HS-FM; and Herman Strecker to Louisa Roy, November 11, 1856, HS-FM.
31. Strecker to Henry Edwards, September 11, 1870, HE.
32. I learned of the death and disease only after reading countless letters to him from others, and of the death of his wife and mother only from a letter of a friend, who had heard the news from someone else.
33. George Hulst to Strecker, May 28, 1878, HS-FM. In his letter, Hulst expresses his condolences regarding the death of another Strecker child.
34. The draft of a letter by Strecker to Edward Owen, April 12, 1882, HS-FM.
35. Strecker, Butterflies and Moths of North America, 2. See also Strecker to Henry Edwards, April 4, 1871, HE. He refers to the “immense amount of labor my collection entails on me in the shape of correspondence, exchanges, slacking, identifying, on and on, which has all to be done after 8 or 9 o’clock in the evening.”
36. Strecker to Henry Edwards, August 22 and November 7, 1872, and August 24, 1874, HE.
37. Fred Tepper to Strecker, HS-FM.
38. Strecker to McGlashan, June 18, 1885, Charles F. McGlashan Papers, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California.
39. “The notes in the latter part” of the notebook “are, I think, partly by my father, and partly by Strecker—or perhaps entirely by my Father, as he was only fifteen,” Wirt Robinson wrote Henry Skinner, March 30, 1908, HS-ANS. Toward the end of his life, Strecker gave this notebook to Russell Robinson as a gift, and Robinson’s son, in turn, gave it to Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences, after his father died, which was the purpose of these letters to Skinner.
Butterfly People Page 41
