49. On these Germans, see Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), especially 365–79, and Jorg Adelberger, “Eduard Vogel and Eduard Robert Flegel: The Experiences of Two Nineteenth-Century German Explorers in Africa,” History of Africa 27 (2000): 1–29.
50. Albert Hyma, The Dutch in the Far East: A History of Dutch Commercial and Colonial Empire (Ann Arbor, MI: George Wahr, 1942), 185–86.
51. See Grove, Green Imperialism, 367–79.
52. The huge correspondence of William Doherty to his family gives a remarkable glimpse into the character of these places, JMH.
53. Doherty to his mother, August 20, 1886, JMH.
54. On Fruhstorfer’s systematic contributions, see Phillip J. DeVries, The Butterflies of Costa Rica, and Their Natural History, vol. 2, Riodinidae (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 59.
55. Vladimir Nabokov to Dmitri Nabokov, May 30, 1970, in Nabokov’s Butterflies, ed. Brian Boyd and Robert Pyle (Boston: Beacon, 2000), 673; and Fruhstorfer’s section on the Brassolidae (a subdivision of the Nymphalidae, to which the morphos belonged), “The Macrolepidoptera of the American Faunistic Region,” in Adalbert Seitz’s The Macrolepidoptera of the World (Stuttgart: Kernen, 1924), 5:353.
56. This experience obviously meant a good deal to Fruhstorfer, since he mentions it three times, with very little variation, in Seitz, Macrolepidoptera, 5:334, 340, 352.
57. L. Martin, “Hans Fruhstorfer,” Iris (November 30, 1922): 1–8; and Hans Fruhstorfer (in Berlin) to Director Mobius, May 31, 1896, MNK; see, for a list of butterflies sold to the museum, c. May 1898, and, for bills for butterfly and beetle species, October 21 and November 12, 1898, MNK.
58. Fruhstorfer to Strecker, March 25, 1890, HS-FM.
59. Skinner to Strecker, December 2, 1889, HS-FM.
60. Henry Skinner, “The Effect of the War in Relation to Entomology,” EN (September 1898): 173.
61. For an account of Thomas Horsfield’s collecting, see his Descriptive Catalogue of Lepidopterous Insects (London, 1828).
62. Willis Weaver to Strecker, August 5, 1878, HS-FM.
63. Ibid.
64. Fred Knab to Strecker, February 23, 1885; September 11, 1885; and January 26, 1886, HS-FM. For Knab’s ad, see “South American Lepidoptera,” Papilio 4, no. 3 (1884): back page.
65. Knab to Strecker, January 26, 1886, HS-FM. Once he stayed overnight along the Amazon on a “terra calidas,” an unstable land formation that slid into the river as he was sleeping, dragging him down and terrifying the life out of him.
66. Knab to his parents, May 13, 1885; and Knab Diary, 1884–86, Frederick Knab Papers, Smithsonian Archives, Washington, DC.
67. Oscar T. Baron to Strecker, February 12, 1883, HS-FM. See also Baron to Strecker, October 20 and 29, 1888, HS-FM; and Baron to Henry Edwards, October 23, 1881, HE.
68. Oscar T. Baron to Strecker, May 16, 1892, HS-FM.
69. Herbert Smith to Strecker, April 24, 1887, HS-FM.
70. Anna Weitzman and Christopher Lyal, “Integrating DNA Barcoding and Taxonomic Data” (Biodiversity Heritage Library, 2003).
71. Henry Elwes to Strecker, May 27, 1888, HS-FM; and Biologia Centrali-Americana: Insecta-Lepidoptera-Rhopalocera, vol. 1, 1879–1901 (London: R. H. Porter, 1915), pp. xxi, 262–357. The Smiths’ species are sprinkled throughout.
72. Henry Elwes to Will Doherty, quoted in a letter from Doherty to his father, October 4, 1888, JMH.
73. Doherty to Ernst Hartert (from Senana, Sula Besi), October 8, 1897, Tring Correspondence, NHM-LONDON.
74. Wilhelm Petersen, Lepidopteren-fauna von Estland (Tallinn-Reval: Eesti, 1924).
75. Doherty to his mother, January 6, 1884, JMH. Even a missionary and his family in Calcutta, with whom Doherty was visiting, took up the pursuit, inviting Doherty to “joke about their attaching a butterfly net to their pastoral crooks.”
76. Doherty to his mother, April 18, 1883, JMH.
77. Doherty to his father, August 31, 1883, JMH.
78. Doherty to his mother, February 17, 1884, JMH.
79. Doherty to his father, August 31, 1883, JMH.
80. Doherty to his mother, December 10, 1885, JMH.
81. Doherty, “A List of Butterflies Taken in Kumaon,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 2 (1886): 104, 121, 136. In the wide gorge of Sarju, below the Lesser Himalayas, through which the Sarju River passed on its way to the Ganges, he spent half a day trying to catch several specimens of a “magnificent species” of Morphidae that were soaring over the void, but they were “un-gettable,” he wrote, “owing to the dangerous and precipitous nature of the place.” He added, “They had true morphid flight, and always settled on the underside of leaves with folded wings” (121).
82. Ibid., 114.
83. Doherty to his mother, July 31, 1885, and September 14, 1885, JMH: “Thanks to the microscope, I am doing more new work in a month now than I used to do in three.”
84. Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 151. All the leading naturalists at the museum—James Wood-Mason, G. F. L. Marshall, and Lionel de Nicéville in particular—urged him to get something in print. They “fairly coaxed me into it,” he wrote his mother. “It would make waves,” they argued. Doherty to his mother, March 15, 1886, JMH.
85. He began with a discussion of the zones that divided up the Kumaon region, from the Great Indian Desert and the foothills and wet meadows at the base of the Himalayas to the forests of the Lesser and Greater Himalayas (the former three to seven thousand feet high, the latter up to ten thousand feet). The two Himalayan tracts, Doherty wrote, contained “all the typical Himalayan forms.” Beyond ten thousand feet one found the alpine valleys, where the butterflies were “chiefly palearctic.” Doherty examined the diversity of seasonal species of butterflies—the dry and wet forms—that distinguished the Kumaon. He speculated about the ocelli, or large eyespots, on the underside of the wings of wet-season genera (for protection against predatory birds). Before Edwards did (although both men were unaware of it), he observed the symbiotic relationship between small blue butterflies (Lycaenidae) and ants, which he had seen in nature. Finally, he presented a tentative new reclassification of butterfly genera based on eggs alone, something he had been thinking about for many months but only now had the courage to publish. Doherty knew that Scudder had planned to publish work on eggs as a basis for generic classification. But his system departed from Scudder’s by resting on “ten genera instead of one (North America being very poor in genera),” and by superceding Scudder’s “absolute Linnaean nomenclature, which correct or not, is certainly unintelligible to the majority of naturalists.” Doherty to his father, March 15, 1886.
86. Doherty to his father, May 28, 1885, JMH.
87. W. Dönitz, “Ed. G. Honrath,” in Berliner Entomologische Zeitschrift 39, no. 2 (1894): 319–20.
88. Doherty to his father, August 31, 1883, JMH.
89. Doherty to his mother, December 26, 1886, JMH; and Doherty to Arthur Butler, June 13, 1887, NHM-LONDON.
90. These words belong to Charles Dury, a Cincinnati naturalist and a close friend of Doherty’s. They appeared in an 1894 interview about Doherty for a Cincinnati newspaper; see typescript, Charles Dury, “On Butterfly Wings,” JMH.
91. “The gist of it is that I’ll be much richer than I thought.” Doherty to his mother, November 24, 1888, JMH.
92. Doherty to William Holland, quoted in Holland’s “Asiatic Lepidoptera.”
93. “I thought I was gone,” he told Henry Elwes in June 1890, “for there was no chance of my being found there, and it seemed quite impossible to do it. It took me eight hours hard work to do it.” Quoted in Henry Elwes, “On Butterflies Collected by W. Doherty in the Naga and Karen Hills and in Perak: Part I,” Transactions of the London Entomological Society (1891): 252.
94. On Doherty’s unprecedented collecting in these places, see Doherty to Arthur Butler, June 13, 1887, NHM-LONDON; Doherty, “The Butterflies of Sumba and Sambawa: Part II,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 60, no. 2 (1891): 146; Elwes, “On Butterflies Collected by W. Doherty,” 249–88; and William Holland, “The Lepidoptera of Buru,” Novitates Zoologicae (1891–92): 54–55, 555–91.
95. Doherty to Charles Dury, no date, but, judging by the postmark, 1888; Charles Dury Papers, Cincinnati Museum of Science.
96. Elwes, quoted in Doherty to his father, May 9, 1891, JMH.
97. Doherty to his father, June 17, 1890, JMH.
98. Colonel G. B. Mainwaring, Dictionary of the Lepcha-Language (Berlin, 1898), 461–64, 489–90, 492, 512, and 516. The butterfly entry is on p. 468, demon on pp. 479–80.
99. Doherty to his mother, February 20, 1890, JMH.
100. Doherty to Julia Doherty, September 30, 1891; to his mother, December 31, 1891, JMH.
101. Ernst Hartert, Aus den Wanderjahren eines Naturforschers (Berlin: R. Friedlander, 1901–2), 209. On Doherty meeting Hartert at the Perak Museum, and on Wray, see pp. 214–15. On Hartert’s career in England, see Paul Lovejoy’s foreword, pp. xvii-xxviii, to Paul Staudinger’s account of this expedition, Im Herzen der Haussaländer (Berlin, 1889), translated by Johanna Moody as In the Heart of the Hausa State (Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1990). On the men for whom Hartert collected, see Doherty to his mother, June 6, 1888, JMH.
102. See Lovejoy’s foreword to Staudinger, In the Heart of the Hausa State. Staudinger did, in fact, collect a few insects, including some “very rare long-tailed Saturnia” and a new beautiful beetle species, Simorrhina staudingeri, caught in Zaria, Sudan. See Staudinger, In the Heart of the Hausa State, 8, 155.
103. Before the trip ended, they had toured the Hausaland, a tribal area in northern Nigeria and the Sudan. See Staudinger, In the Heart of the Hausa State, Lovejoy’s foreword and p. 55.
104. Hartert, Aus den Wanderjahren, 3, 81; and Staudinger, In the Heart of the Hausa State, 8, 55, 126–27, 155, 198, 205, and Lovejoy’s foreword.
105. “When he met Mrs. Kunstler in Perak,” soon after her husband’s death at sea in 1888, Doherty further explained to his mother, Hartert “outraged her feelings by asking her to tell him all the late K’s tricks of the trade.” See Doherty to his mother, June 6, 1888, JMH.
106. “It will be very good for me if he comes,” Doherty wrote his mother, “because I can learn practical bird stuffing. Also I can talk German with him which will be very good for me.” Doherty to his mother, July 18, 1888, JMH.
107. Hartert, Aus den Wanderjahren, 228.
108. Doherty to his mother, August 18 and November 24, 1888; and Doherty to his sister, Tata, December 4, 1888, JMH.
109. Ernst Hartert, obituary of Doherty in Novitates Zoologicae 8 (1901): 497.
110. Hartert, Aus den Wanderjahren, 236 and 235.
111. Doherty to his mother, November 24, 1888, JMH.
112. Doherty to his father, December 27, 1891, JMH. On Doherty’s thoughts on Daisy Smith, see Doherty to his sister Tata, October 4, 1888, JMH.
113. Doherty to his cousin May, July 20, 1889, JMH.
114. Doherty to Scudder, August 16, 1895, SS-BMS.
115. On the deafness, see Doherty to his mother, April 14, 1890, JMH; on the infections and diseases, see Doherty to his mother, May 18, 1888, and January 14, 1893, JMH; and Doherty to Hartert, December 1, 1899, Tring Correspondence, NHM-LONDON.
116. Doherty to his mother, April 18, 1883, JMH.
117. On these various figures, see Doherty to his mother, September 28, 1890; Doherty to Julia Doherty, May 15, 1892; and Doherty to his mother, January 19, 1893, JMH.
118. Doherty to his mother, November 11, 1889; and Doherty to his father, October 1, 1890, JMH.
119. Doherty to his mother, April 9, 1892, JMH. “Elwes and I correspond a great deal now,” he wrote his mother in 1891 (Doherty to his mother, September 11, 1891, JMH).
120. He no longer wanted to live in the United States, he favored Trinidad, where he imagined bringing his Lepchas as well as the entire Doherty clan. Doherty to Harlan Doherty, March 30, 1891; and to his mother, September 28, 1890, JMH.
121. Doherty to Lili Doherty (from Macassar), June 20, 1896, JMH.
122. Doherty to Edward Janson, November 22, 1897 (from Ternate), and May 1898 (from Albion Place), Entomological Library, NHM-LONDON.
123. Doherty to his father (from Buru, Moluccas), March 27, 1897, JMH.
124. Doherty to his mother (from Dorey, New Guinea), June 12, 1897, JMH.
125. Doherty to Hartert (from Senana, Sula Besi), October 8, 1897, Tring Correspondence, NHM-LONDON.
126. Doherty to Lili Doherty, June 20, 1896, JMH.
127. Doherty to his mother (from Dorey, New Guinea), June 12, 1897; and Doherty to Lili Doherty, June 20, 1896, JMH.
128. Doherty to Harlan, March 30, 1891; to his mother, January 14, 1893; and to his father, November 1, 1893, JMH.
129. He requested especially the Franklin Square or Seaside Library editions of novels, early precursors of paperbacks that he could easily carry around with him. Doherty to his mother, August 11, 1892, JMH.
130. Doherty to his father, c. 1889, and from Buru, Moluccas, June 20, 1896, JMH.
131. Doherty to his father, November 24, 1895, JMH.
132. Elwes to Doherty, May 9, 1891; November 1892; and July 19, 1891, JMH. For Elwes’s article on Doherty’s butterflies, see Henry Elwes, “On Butterflies Collected by W. Doherty,” 259.
133. Doherty to his mother, June 3, 1893, JMH.
134. Doherty to his father, November 24, 1895, JMH.
135. Doherty to his mother, June 3, 1893, JMH.
136. On Rothschild’s naming, see Doherty to Rothschild, September 25, 1895, Tring Correspondence, NHM-LONDON. “Thank you for the Attacus dohertii,” Doherty wrote. “It is very pleasant to have my name mentioned in connection with various species, as you have done.”
137. Doherty to Rothschild, November 24, 1895, NHM-LONDON.
138. Doherty to his mother, June 1893, JMH.
139. “I can see the Highland House on the Neversink Mountain … from the window of my butterfly room,” he wrote to Isaac Martindale, June 1890 (no day), Martindale Papers, Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
140. Alexander Humboldt, introduction, Cosmos, vol. 1 (1845; repr., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 40.
141. O. D. Foulks to Strecker, August 2, 1894, HS-FM.
142. Strecker to Holland, February 15, 1882, WH-CM.
143. On “three times the size,” see Strecker to Hermann Hagen, October 6, 1881, Letters to Hermann Hapen, EML. The specimen figures come from many contemporary accounts, but see “Butterflies and Moths,” Rochester Morning Journal, July 6, 1887; “Reading,” in Morton Montgomery, History of Berks County (Philadelphia, 1886), 807–8; and Cincinnati Communer Gazette, November 26, 1892. These reports can be found in Box 60, folder 397, “Corporate Entities,” HS-FM.
144. See Strecker to Holland, March 31, 1887, WH-CM. Hewitson paid $1,300 for the first two available specimens in 1875 (Hewitson to Strecker, April 4, 1875, HS-FM). Five years later, a dozen male specimens were scattered about in various European collections (Arthur Butler to Henry Edwards, February 5, 1883, HE). The Berlin collector Eduard Honrath paid 400 marks for his specimen, collected in Gabon by Fritz Krickledorff (Honrath to Strecker, September 21, 1881, HS-FM). In 1883 and ’84, Watkins & Doncaster sold to Americans (see Papilio 3 [April 1883]: 85; and 4 [January 1884]. For a description of the insect, see Bernard d’Abrera, Butterflies of the World (London: Hill House, 2001), 147.
145. Elwes to Strecker, August 15, 1890, HS-FM.
146. On the terms “stock of monstrosities” and “my especial mania,” and on the silver butterfly, see Strecker to Holland, November 29,1882, WH-HSWP.
147. Ibid.
148. Strecker to Samuel Henshaw, May 10,
1889, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
149. See William Holland, “Maternal Ancestry,” Box 4, folder 3, WH-HSWP; and Holland to Dale Pontius, December 5, 1923, WH-CM.
150. Holland, “Butterflies,” Mentor (August 2, 1915): 1–2.
151. Holland to his parents, February 9, 1868, WH-HSWP; and Holland to Dale Pontius, December 5, 1923, WH-CM.
152. Holland, “Ecclesiastical Relations and Positions,” in a typed sketch of his own life, “W. H. Holland,” Box 16, folder 1, WH-HSWP; on the prestige of the Princeton seminary, see Barry Werth, Banquet at Delmonico’s: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America (New York: Random House, 2009), 76.
153. Holland to his parents, November 20, 1873, WH-HSWP.
154. Toward the end of his life, his parents long dead, Holland tried publicly to justify his decision in the face of criticism that he might have switched faiths for nonreligious reasons. “I was especially attracted to the Presbyterian Church,” he explained in a journal on religion, “because it seemed to me more than any other communion in America to stand for liberty of conscience. It seemed to me to be of all denominations the most American in America. There appeared to be in it more of the spirit of the fathers, of the Republic, who had laid broad and deep the foundations of religious liberty throughout the land.” See “Reminiscences and a Plea,” undated draft but probably early 1920s, Box 16, folder 1, WH-HSWP.
155. Francis Holland to William Holland, November 25, 1873, and Holland to his parents, December 21 and 22, 1873, WH-HSWP.
156. Holland to his parents, November 7, 1873, WH-HSWP.
157. On Carrie’s inheritances and Holland’s executorships, see Holland to his parents, October 25, 1880, and December 7, 1889, WH-HSWP; on John Moorhead Sr. and Jr., see Holland to Scudder, December 25, 1889, SS-BMS, and John Ingham, Making Iron and Steel: Independent Mills in Pittsburgh (Cleveland: Ohio State University Press, 1981).
158. Papilio 3, no. 1 (1883): 27.
159. Holland to his parents, February 25, 1886; and William Henry Edwards to Holland, March 8, 1886, WH-HSWP.
160. Catalog 35, Staudinger, WH-HSWP.
161. Elizabeth Martindale to Strecker, March 15, 1892, HS-FM
Butterfly People Page 48
