Butterfly People

by William R. Leach

  162. Doherty to his father, January 14, 1890, JMH.

  163. Doherty to his father, January 24, 1891, JMH.

  164. Doherty to Holland, February 14, 1893, WH-CM.

  165. Henry Skinner to Strecker, May 11, 1889, HS-FM.

  166. See opening “notes,” Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift 2 (1889); Neumoegen to Strecker, May 2, 1889; April 6, 1889; March 11, 1890; and April 28, 1893, HS-FM; and Staudinger to Scudder, April 6, 1889, SS-BMS. In 1884, when King Leopold of Belgium announced himself the sole “proprietor” of the African Congo, as if it had been “vacant land,” and dispatched an expedition, Neumoegen purchased a piece of the enterprise, hoping to get “the best man” to find butterflies for him (New York Times, November 28, 1887). On Leopold, see Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Western Equatorial Africa,” in The Cambridge History of Africa, ed. Oliver and Sanderson, 316–18.

  167. Doherty to his father, November 1, 1887, JMH.

  168. Doherty to his father, April 25, 1888; Doherty to his mother, November 11, 1889, JMH; and Neumoegen to Strecker, March 11, 1890, and April 28, 1893, HS-FM. For Doherty’s fondness for Neumoegen, see Doherty (from Assam) to his father, November 11, 1889, and Doherty to his mother, November 11, 1889, JMH.

  169. Doherty, “Green Butterflies,” Psyche 6 (1891): 68.

  170. “A Butterfly Without a Price,” Entomologist 27, no. 368 (1894): 65–66; and Doherty, “The Butterflies of Sumba and Sambawa: Part II,” 157.

  171. Miller Evans of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, to Strecker, May 24, 1882, HS-FM.

  172. The Naturalists’ Directory, ed. Samuel Cassino (Boston, 1886), 154; and F. Cormack (dealer) to Strecker, September 13, 1897, HS-FM.

  173. By 1895, many dealers in the United States were making their living from buying and selling insects. Among them were George Franck, old John Akhurst, and F. Cormack in New York City; Henry Engle in Pittsburgh (a seller of exotics); Charles Wiley in Manhattan, Kansas; L. E. Richsecker in Sonoma, California; F. W. Dieckman in San Francisco; H. H. Newcomb in Boston; and Ward’s Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, New York, long a popular business, which in the 1890s decided to sell the world’s insects. For citations of these men, see the Zoologisches Adressbuch, vols. 1 and 2. All the American dealers mentioned here can be found cited in these volumes, excellent sources for information on dealing, and on every other facet of naturalist activity in the world. For informal dealers, see Henry K. Burrison (who “devoted two evenings a week to my fad”) and James Blake, Edward Owen, James Bailey, Oscar Baron, Adolph Conradi, Carl Braun, Edward Warren, and Herbert Loitloff. For the Burrison quote, see Burrison to Strecker, December 27, 1900, HS-FM.

  174. Strecker to Charles MacGlashan, September 23, 1885, Charles F. MacGlashan Papers, c. 1878–1899, BANC MSS C-B, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; and Augustus Mundt to Strecker, December 21, 1879, HS-FM.

  175. Strecker to Holland, March 25, 1884; Edward Kremp to Strecker, October 12, 1884, HS-FM; and Strecker to George French, March 20, 1883, GF.

  176. On the number of duplicates, see Strecker to Charles MacGlashan, September 23, 1885, HS-FM.

  177. Charles Dury to Strecker, c. 1874, and August 10, 1876, HS-FM.

  178. Adolph Eisen to Strecker, December 21, 1880, HS-FM. All the quotes in this paragraph come from this letter. See also Eisen to Strecker, December 1, 1880, HS-FM.

  179. Simon Seib to Strecker, August 25, 1885, HS-FM.

  180. O. D. Foulks to Strecker, August 8, 1891, HS-FM.

  181. Mrs. M. E. Truman to Strecker, December 1, December 12, and December 25, 1892, HS-FM.

  182. Emily Morton to Strecker, February 2, 1880; and Adrian Latimer to Strecker, October 17, 1879, and February 10, 1888, HS-FM.

  183. Frank Snow to Strecker, September 24, 1879; and Elison Smyth to Strecker, December 19, 1883, HS-FM.

  184. George Ehrman to Strecker, February 6 and March 11, 1886, HS-FM.

  185. Ehrman to Strecker, May 7, 1891; July 9, 1894; June 8, 1888; and July 15, 1886, HS-FM.

  186. Louis Glaser (of Allegheny City, Pennsylvania) to Strecker, January 6, 1885.

  187. Ehrman to Strecker, February 26, 1893, HS-FM. On the damage inflicted by the gas wells, see William Holland, The Moth Book: A Guide to the Moths of North America (1903; repr., New York, 1968); on others who collected at the wells, see Louis Glaser of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, September 9 and 26, 1888.

  188. George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory (1896; repr., New York: Dover, 1961), 95.

  7. Butterflies at the Fair

  1. On Samuel Scudder at the fair, William Henry Edwards’s family at the fair, and Edwards’s inability to attend, see William Henry Edwards to Samuel Scudder, September 2, 1893, SS-BMS. Since their “introduction into our cities,” Scudder observed in BEUSC, “entomologists have made use of electrical lights for the capture of insects, many nocturnal animals being attracted from the surrounding country by the brilliancy of the light” (vol. 1, p. 377).

  2. Selim Peabody, The White City (as It Was) (Chicago, 1894), from his concluding statement, “The Story of the White City,” unpaginated; Official Guide to the World’s Columbian Exposition, handbook ed. (Chicago, 1893), 161; and Ralph Julian, Chicago and the World’s Fair (New York, 1893), 114.

  3. On Smith’s display, see Herbert Smith to Ezra Cresson, December 2, 1892, Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia. For David Bruce, see Bruce to Isaac Martindale, June 15, 1891, Isaac Martindale Collection 533, Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia; and “Historical Department,” in Report of Board of World’s Fair Managers of Colorado (Denver, 1894), 47. On French’s exhibit for Illinois, see the account covering “the geographical distribution of Illinois Buttterflies shown by a set of specimens of the species: (a) Common to Illinois and the Atlantic Slope; (b) common to Illinois and the Pacific Slope; (c) common to Illinois and Europe; (d) found throughout Illinois; (e) found in northern Illinois only; (f) found in southern Illinois only.” This exhibit “as well as the ornithological and ichthyological exhibition have been pronounced by scientists as superior to any exhibition of the kind heretofore attempted. The whole division will be found very interesting to the student of nature or even the casual observer.” Anonymous, The Illinois Building and Exhibits Therein at the World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893 (Chicago: John Morris, 1893), 54–55. I have been unable to confirm that Smith actually made his display at the New York exhibit.

  4. William Holland to Scudder, October 3, 1892, SS-BMS.

  5. The Pennsylvania managers had written Strecker in July (see John Woodward to Herman Strecker, July 4, 1892, HS-FM). The stuffed bird and egg exhibition covering all the state birds at the Pennsylvania fair site was enormous, so one can only imagine what the butterfly display might have looked like had someone managed to fill it. “Probably no similar exhibit on the grounds elicited so much attention and commendation as this,” the catalog asserted. See the text and photographs of the State of Pennsylvania, Catalogue of Exhibits of the State of Pennsylvania and of Pennsylvanians at the World’s Columbian Exposition (Harrisburg: Clarence M. Busch, State Printer of Pennsylvania, 1893), 164–71. For the initial offer to Strecker and for its final withdrawal, see John Woodward to Strecker, December 25, 1892, and telegram dated January 21, 1893, delivered by the Philadelphia, Reading and Pottsville Telegraph Company (connected to Western Union), HS-FM.

  6. Holland to Scudder, October 3, 1892, SS-BMS.

  7. Official Guide to the World’s Columbian Exposition, 61, 65, 96–97, 103; and Julian, Chicago and the World’s Fair, 116, 140–41.

  8. Official Guide to the World’s Columbian Exposition, 46–47.

  9. Katherine Peabody Girling, Selim Hobart Peabody (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1923), 191; Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston, 1907; repr., 1918), 343–44. It would be a mistake to exaggerate the significance of the commercial at the cost of ignoring the purely cultural or educational (meaning noncommercial) character of the fai
r. According to the historian Jim Gilbert, in Perfect Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), “the commercial impression generated by the White City, was not, perhaps, always successful as a strategy for the sale of goods. Indeed, several articles in the important advertising journal Printer’s Ink suggest that attention to culture overwhelmed the regard for commerce” (102). The American people did not, then, automatically equate culture with commerce, which says something about them and this age. At the same time, the commercial and the cultural often became so entangled at so many points in the fair as to seem one and the same thing, a spectacular intermingling of old and new, nature and artifact, money and art. On the free darkrooms, see Julie K. Brown, Contesting Images: Photography at the World’s Columbian Exposition (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), 94–97.

  10. Peabody, The White City, in the unpaginated concluding section, “The Story of the White City”; Official Guide to the World’s Columbian Exposition, 15, 49, 113; W. H. Edwards (American consul general in Berlin), “Europe at the World’s Fair,” North American Review 155, no. 432 (1892): 623–30; and Brown, Contesting Images, 27.

  11. Emory L. Kemp, The Great Kanawha Navigation (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 24–25, 71–72.

  12. Julian, Chicago and the World’s Fair, 97; and John C. Trautwine, “Two Great Railroad Exhibits at Chicago,” Cassirer’s Magazine (January-February 1894; repr., Lindsay Publications, 2004), 20.

  13. Peabody, The White City, concluding statement, “The Story of the White City.”

  14. Harold Platt, The Electric City: Energy and the Growth of the Chicago Area, 1880–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 16–37, 59–92; David Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 29–38; Official Guide, 22–24, 52–54; and John Findling, Chicago’s Great World’s Fairs (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 82–83.

  15. Brown, Contesting Images, 25, 30.

  16. Guide Through the Exhibition of the German Chemical Industry: Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893 (Berlin: Julius Sittenfeld, 1893), 58, 63–65. German chemical companies led all other German businesses in support of exhibiting at the fair (1).

  17. I want to note here that previous “industrial expositions” in the United States on the regional and local levels were often mixed events, displaying items from “natural history” as well as manufactured goods and machines. See, for instance, the program of the “Fifth Cincinnati Industrial Exposition, 1874” with a special “department” on “natural history,” including “best collection of insects and cocoons” (in the Charles Dury Correspondence with Strecker, HS-FM).

  18. George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition at Bay,” written in 1931 and republished in The Genteel Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 185; and The Sense of Beauty: Being an Outline of Aesthetic Theory (1896; repr., New York: Dover, 1961), 64, 108.

  19. Lester Ward, “Art Is the Antithesis of Nature,” an 1884 lecture republished in Henry Steele Commager, ed., Lester Ward and the Welfare State (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 11, 77; and Comte de Buffon, “Initial Discourse,” in From Natural History to the History of Nature, ed. John Lyon and Phillip Sloan (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 111.

  20. This argument has been partly influenced by George Basalla’s The Evolution of Technology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), especially chapter 1, in which he compares natural with “artifactual diversity,” 1–15.

  21. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 89; and Robert Kohler, All Creatures: Naturalists, Collectors, and Biodiversity, 1850–1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), especially pp. 1–46.

  22. On the creation of “twilight zones” caused by railroads, see Robert Kohler’s fine discussion in All Creatures, 1–46. Kohler also uses “inner frontiers” as a substitute for “twilight zones.”

  23. Ibid., 18. On the nature literature produced during this period, see the books of Liberty Hyde Bailey.

  24. Samuel Klages to Henry Skinner, June 19, 1899, HS-PAS.

  25. William Henry Edwards to Theodore Mead, October 19, 1888, and October 26, 1872, TM.

  26. Edwards to Joseph Lintner, December 2, 1878, JL.

  27. William Henry Edwards to Henry Edwards, May 20, 1873, and January 30, 1875; and Edwards to William Greenwood Wright, October 23, 1893, WHE-SA.

  28. William Edwards to Theodore Mead, December 2, 1886, TM.

  29. William Henry Edwards describes this activity in his Entomological Diary, July 11, 1884, WHE-SA. In 1886, Willie filed his own patent for a “novel use of natural gas,” or gas so powerfully magnified and channeled through a heated blowpipe as to convert slag and melted metal into Bessemer steel; see Willie Edwards to Theodore Mead, December 21, 1886, TM.

  30. Edwards to Wright, October 23, 1893, WGW.

  31. On clientele, see Edwards to Scudder, May 1, 1894; and Edwards to Wright, October 13, 1896, WGW.

  32. Entomological Diary, June 23 and 25, August 15, and August 10, 1894.

  33. Edwards to Wright, June 29, 1895, WGW. Three years later, Edwards commemorated the date again for Wright: “Three years ago, this AM I waked up at Glenwood Spr. and took my first walk up Grand River, and saw Dionysius in the flesh. What a good two months I had!” (June 29, 1897).

  34. For Kirby and Spence, see Introduction to Entomology, vol. I (1843; repr., Elibron Classics, 2005), 532; on Gustav Belfrage, see Samuel Geiser, Naturalists of the Frontier (Dallas: Southern University Press, 1952), 236; on light trap development, see “Chronological History of the Development of Insecticides and Control Equipment from 1854 to 1954” (Washington, DC: USDA Agricultural Research Service, 1954); and on Dury, see Dury to Strecker, no date but c. 1873, HS-FM. The same thing happened in other countries at the same time. See Von F. Wesely, “Das elektrische Licht und Die Schmetterlinge,” Entomologische Zeitschrift (July 1888): 37; and Henry S. Saunders, “Collecting at the Electric Light, 1886,” CE (February 1887): 1–2.

  35. BEUSC, vol. 1, p. 377. “Nowadays,” echoed Charles Valentine Riley in 1892, “the electric lights in all large cities furnish the best collecting places, and hundreds of species may be taken in almost any desired quantity.” C. V. Riley, Directions for Collecting and Preserving Insects (Washington, DC, 1892), 51. David Bruce used many “lights” to collect moths. “I am trying to arrange a portable Lime Light (or Calcium light),” he wrote Henry Edwards in 1884, “so I can have something more effective than the Kerosene lamp when I go to the mountains next year—last year I spent two weeks at Buffalo Creek, forty miles from Denver and about 1000 feet higher, and had good luck with a reflector, Kerosene Lamp” (Bruce to Edwards, December 23, 1884, HE). Bruce also relied on the new electrical globes in Denver and elsewhere.

  36. George Franck to Strecker, July 16, 1884, HS-FM; George L. Hudson to John Smith, August 9 and November 8, 1886, Smithsonian Archives, Record Unit 138, Division of Insects, Incoming Correspondence, 1878–1906; and Edward Warren to Strecker, June 23, 1884, HS-FM.

  37. John Morris to Strecker, December 20, 1884, HS-FM.

  38. Max Albright to Strecker, November 5, 1894. The Albright material comes from these other letters to Strecker: October 30, 1893; April 15, 1894; August 5, 1894; and June 14, 1896, HS-FM.

  39. See editorial, EN 2, no. 8 (1891): 8–9. On the historical significance of the halftone process, see Neil Harris, “Iconography and Intellectual History: The Halftone Effect,” first published in 1979 and republished in Harris, Cultural Excursions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 304–17.

  40. F. N. Doubleday to Holland, April 13, 1900, WH-HSWP; and Neltje Blanchan, Bird Neighbors (New York: Garden City Publishers, 1922; from the 1904 Doubleday edition), x.

  41. Holland to his parents, November 6–9, 1891, Box 24, folder 7, WH-HSWP.

  42. Pittsburgh
Dispatch, October 29, 1899, in Holland Scrapbook, p. A718; and Holland to his parents, December 3, 1892, WH-HSWP. By 1899, students from England, Germany, Mexico, and Canada were attending the university.

  43. Carnegie began calling “at our cottage,” and then “we called on his.” Quoted in The Life of Andrew Carnegie by Burton Hendrick and Daniel Henderson (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1932), 1:227–28. On the summer resort, see 1:114. Holland performed the role of family naturalist, or “the butterfly man,” to Margaret, Carnegie’s young daughter. See Holland to Scudder, May 8, 1890, SS-BMS.

  44. Holland to Scudder, July 11, 1890, SS-BMS.

  45. Holland to parents, February 10, 1890, WH-HSWP.

  46. Even before the museum had left the drawing boards, he had bought outright for Holland a very costly collection of butterflies caught near Sikkim, one of the first of its kind ever made. “He does this at my suggestion,” Holland reported to his parents. “He is a very generous man.” Holland to Isaac Martindale, October 3, 1892, Martindale correspondence, Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia; and Holland to his parents, November 23, 1892, WH-HSWP.

  47. Edward Klages to Henry Skinner, December 29, 1903, HS-ANS.

  48. Holland to W. Baxter, May 9, 1902, Holland Letterbook, WH-CM.

  49. On Carnegie’s bequest, see William Schaus to Henry Skinner, October 20, 1919, HS-ANS: “I didn’t know that Carnegie had left Holland 5000 a year, and as he has a rich wife, I think you or I could have made better use of the money, but to him who hath much shall be given.”

  50. See his handwritten remembrance beginning “In the year 1879,” c. 1920, Box 24, Holland Papers, WH-HSWP.

  51. Holland to his parents, February 10, 1890, WH-HSWP.

  52. Edwards to Scudder, April 27, 1899, SS-BMS.

  53. Holland to Scudder, June 21, 1898, WH-HSWP. On Doubleday’s distribution and advertising, see Doubleday to Holland, October 6, 1898, WH-HSWP.

  54. George Iles, Flame, Electricity, and the Camera (New York: Doubleday and McClure, 1900).