Butterfly People Page 10
Strecker no doubt agreed, given his preference for exchange. Yet he had little choice but to rely on prices or paying in cash and by credit. From the start, as he built his circuit of collectors in Europe and America, he paid in money whenever feasible, especially for large lots, and then resold those lots piecemeal at a profit in the United States, to finance his own collection. Strecker would always distrust the modern market economy, but, as his desire grew in relation to the growth of that very economy such that he could not, at times, master his desire, it turned out he was willing to accept some degree of “desecration.” He never seemed concerned that the intrinsic value of a butterfly might be subverted by its price. Nor did he worry about losing face or status because he sold and bought butterflies; Strecker never sought a profit to meet his own material needs: everything he did was in behalf of his collection, con amore.46
Strecker’s key European contact was Otto Staudinger of Dresden, the most influential butterfly man of the nineteenth century, an entomological Svengali whose spell over many Americans would grow stronger year by year. Born in 1830 to upper-middle-class Prussians, Staudinger was educated at the University of Berlin in medicine, then in natural history, specializing in insects. From his thirteenth year, like so many German youths, he chased butterflies, hunting throughout Europe, from Iceland to Granada; in Sardinia, he discovered the larva of Papilio hospiton, the loveliest and rarest of Europe’s three swallowtails. He became one of the most respected butterfly authorities in Europe, with enough firepower to infuriate Scudder and Edwards, who objected to his uninformed judgments about American butterfly fauna. Staudinger, however, did more than study butterflies or write catalogs about them; to help pay for his travels, he also created a butterfly business, formed, at first, from his own collection. In Dresden, he converted it into a successful enterprise, at first buying and selling only European lepidoptera, then slowly dipping into the tropical trade, with the capacity to determine price levels—a skeletal standardized market—throughout the transatlantic world, just as he had tended to dictate European naming. Edwards and Scudder disagreed with Staudinger over his ideas on American butterflies, but Strecker’s relationship was entirely of another kind. Around 1870, Strecker was trading American butterflies for European, but, as with his other business relationships, paying cash when necessary, at great personal sacrifice, and always trusting that Staudinger had given him an honest price; sometimes he borrowed money to get what he wanted. In time, he would get snared, almost helplessly, within Staudinger’s seductive webs.
A few Americans shared Strecker’s desire for exotics, and Strecker did everything within his power to court them. One was Tryon Reakirt, a manufacturer of lead products in Philadelphia, an excellent naturalist briefly rich enough to collect exotics as well as domestic species (many of which he actually named and described); he even wrote up descriptions of African and South American butterflies, which Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences published in its proceedings. He bought many from Pierre Lorquin, the man who collected for Boisduval, and Reakirt thought he’d discovered new species but ended up only redescribing many already identified by European naturalists. In 1870, Strecker tried desperately to obtain the butterflies of Reakirt, after he put them up for sale. Generously, Reakirt let Strecker study the collection and even allowed him to take it home with him for a while, provided Strecker help find him a buyer; having little money of his own, Strecker tried unsuccessfully to persuade the banker Joseph Drexel to purchase the butterflies. Sometime in early 1871, Reakirt fled the country, never to return, leaving Strecker in full possession of his treasure, for which Strecker apparently never paid a cent.47
Strecker’s most regular American supplier of exotics was the actor Henry Edwards of San Francisco, a man willing to exchange specimens—always Strecker’s preference and less open to potentially dishonorable dealings. Edwards’s influence on Strecker, at least for a short time, matched Staudinger’s. Edwards had his fingers on an enormous reserve of American specimens, as well as on exotics from the Australian region, where he had lived before immigrating to America in 1867. In 1869, after hearing from a friend about Strecker’s obsession, he promptly opened trade with him, ready to “drop all my correspondents in the Atlantic States, and send all and everything to you.”48 “I am perfectly omnivorous as regards Lepidoptera,” Henry Edwards said. Strecker countered, “I am as omnivorous regarding Lepidoptera as you possibly can be” and “I want omnium.”49 Sprinkled with such yearning phrases as “I have longed for,” “I will have no peace until,” and “my soul pines,” Strecker’s letters to the actor were charged with his Sehnsucht.50 “Through his splendid correspondents,” he sent Edwards as many exotics as he could get from Armenia, northern Persia, Siberia, Spain, and Senegal and, “as usual,” wanted “anything and everything in any quantity” from Edwards. “The reason I have been so importunate in my letters,” he explained, “is that I have five parties in Europe and West Asia with whom I exchange and they have things reduced to such a system that if I want to see the best of their season’s accumulation, I must send my things, about the beginning or the farthest, middle of December. If I do not, their best things go to others. So please get going.”51 Edwards did all he could to satisfy Strecker’s “desiderata,” especially for his personal cabinet.
In 1871, Strecker opened the mail to find from Edwards his very first green-and-gold Ornithoptera priamus, the birdwing he had gushed over as a boy at the Philadelphia academy. Oh, this was something, a moment to weep over, a moment to stash in the deepest reserves of memory, as if some god had spoken to him. “There is no use trying to express my feelings at beholding the splendid ornithoptera. Only to think the dream of my childhood fulfilled for since I was five years old I coveted and fretted for the Green Ornithoptera.”52
Over time, Strecker’s attention to exotics and insatiable collecting would sweep away almost everything else. But in the early 1870s, he seemed determined to belong to the company of American naturalists who were exploring the fauna of North America. He bought and sold American species in preparation for his own study, trading, for instance, with fellow German-American Fred Tepper, a tailor in his early thirties, who worked at a skin-and-leather business in lower Manhattan. Like a few others, Tepper had an interest in exotics, although American insects held a primary place. He exchanged with Strecker specimens he had collected in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where he’d lived since 1872, a locale of a complex hybrid character, farmland but also wild, with tiny waterfalls, secluded wooded glens, and rare lepidoptera, a far cry from the asphalt metropolis it would become. On one occasion, Tepper also caught numerous Hesperia massasoit, a skipper given an Indian name by Scudder in 1864, “thirty or forty” of which Tepper shared with Strecker. One fall, he found many “different species [of moths]” in “one spot”; he noted, “I intend going to that place next season and to stay four or five days, just simply to catch Catocalas, so I expect to have several hundred duplicates of this beautiful family next year.” He put aside “many good Catocalas” for Strecker, “comprising about twenty different species,” which “I hope will please you.”53 In the same woods he came upon a caterpillar of a rare moth, Smerinthus myops, and “hoped” the beast “would get through all right,” pupate, and emerge as an adult. Once, his brother brought him another moth larva, picked off a small swamp plant, “one of the handsomest caterpillars I ever saw. It is golden yellow covered with minute stripes of bright red and having large broad white stripes on the sides,” he told Strecker.54
In 1872, Strecker began a catalog in twelve parts, each with its own lithographic plate, descriptions, and commentary, issuing one part every several months at fifty cents apiece. He published it under the ponderous title Lepidoptera: Rhopaloceres et Heteroceres, terms borrowed from Boisduval; the former refers to butterflies, the latter, moths. A friend of Strecker’s, Arthur Fuller, the editor of a popular journal of the day, the Rural New Yorker, objected to the title on the grounds that “Lepidoptera is an unknown wo
rd to nine tenths of our people,” suggesting, instead, “Day and Night Among the Butterflies,” because it would “make Strecker more money.” But Strecker stood his ground, faithful to the formality of the European tradition.55 Each part was almost entirely the product of a single man, a distinction that set Strecker apart from all the other butterfly men of his day and, in the eyes of some, made him a superior figure.56 Strecker wrote the text, set the type, and drew, colored, and lithographed the images—exhausting craftsmanship done mostly at night and all, doubtless, legacy of his exposure to artists and artisans on both sides of his family. He lugged a heavy lithographic stone by train from Philadelphia to Reading, drew his images on the stone in crayon, and then took the stone back to Philadelphia for final reproduction of the plates. He did this many times and at much cost to himself. “If it had ten times the circulation, it would never do more than cover expenses,” he wrote a friend in 1874.57 If every other leading lepidopterist had chosen to emulate Strecker in his mastery of every facet of conception and execution, the whole history of American butterfly science might have gone down a very different road.
The impact of the early parts of the catalog was impressive, especially in England. Many in London viewed Strecker as the best authority on lepidoptera America had yet produced. “Strecker stands high here, much higher than W. H. Edwards,” wrote Richard Stretch, an English émigré and a butterfly naturalist, to Henry Edwards. Strecker’s greatest fan there was William Hewitson, a British surveyor who used inherited wealth to become a preeminent amateur naturalist and an accomplished artist of many elegant plates of butterflies for notable volumes, including The Genera of Diurnal Lepidoptera (1852) by Edward Doubleday and John O. Westwood, the book that influenced the way William Henry Edwards grouped his butterflies.58 A creationist (“each species is in itself perfect”) and an anti-Darwinist, Hewitson despised naturalists who analyzed butterflies or who broke them down into parts or pieces, thereby destroying, he believed, their basic reason for being: the power of their beauty. For him, butterflies existed for the delight they gave to human beings, and he considered “any man as a personal enemy who abuses butterflies with unnecessary names and surrounds them with difficulties.” “I wish Edwards and Scudder had never been born,” he told Strecker. But he “thought the world of Strecker,” sure he was a soul mate and fellow artist who longed for butterflies for the same reason Hewitson did: because, as he put it, “they were beautiful things.”59
Hewitson showered Strecker with butterflies no one in America had ever seen, except as pictures. The Antimachus swallowtail, the biggest in Africa, “had never gladdened European eyes” until Hewitson himself got hold of it. Hewitson also sent Strecker a Morpho menelaus, one of the bluest of morphos; Papilio antenor, a lovely polka-dotted African swallowtail; and two sensational birdwings, discovered by Alfred Russel Wallace in the 1850s: Ornithoptera croesus, male and female, and Ornithoptera brookiana (now Troides brookiana). They made Strecker “the happiest man alive,” partly because Hewitson had sold them to him for almost nothing; when Strecker offered to pay more, he objected: “Do not talk about recompensing me for trouble. The intense pleasure you express in the receipt of the things I send you gives me pleasure almost as great and I feel as if for the first time in my life I had met with one as deeply inoculated with these things as I am myself.”60 In a review of the early parts of Lepidoptera, Hewitson wrote that “the plates are all drawn by Strecker himself, after a hard day’s work, and could only be done under such circumstances by an entomologist whose heart and soul are in his work.”61 Strecker later referred to Hewitson as “the greatest living authority on Diurnal Lepidoptera.”62
More than anyone of his time, Strecker stood for or embodied the democratic American community of butterfly lovers, many of whom studied insects scientifically, but the majority of whom were merely engrossed in lepidoptera, grateful for their existence and for living in the same world with them. Strecker fostered a correspondence of many thousands of letters, written by individuals from around the country who were inspired—as one sheep farmer put it—by his “ardor and grand enthusiasm” and were willing to act as his hod carriers.63 Once, on a walking tour of Williamsburg, the Brooklyn taxidermist John Akhurst stopped at a saloon, where he spotted a “case full of blue Morphos” above the bar, only a few of which he had ever seen. He begged the bartender for it, managed to get it, and then gave it gratis to Strecker, knowing how happy it would make him. “You may be assured there is no living man but your SELF,” he wrote Strecker, “I would have taken so much trouble to please.”64 In the fall of 1871, James Angus, a farmer in West Farms, New York, parted with his only Catocala relicta, a gray moth with black underwings banded in white he “had labored hard to obtain for years,” confessing to Strecker that “no hundred or more of my insects have cost me half so much trouble,” and adding, “I know you will be pleased with it.” Three years later, Henry Schonborn, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., thrashed about for hours in “thousands of lilac bushes ten miles square” to find moths for Strecker; and at the end of the decade, Adrian Latimer, a drugstore worker from Lumpkin, Georgia, sent Strecker a “splendid” selection of local “blue” butterflies, or Lycaenidae, after learning about Strecker’s “needs” from one of his books.65 Two of his most loyal patrons were George Hulst and Berthold Neumoegen. Hulst was a young pastor in Flatbush whose “Dutch ancestors had lived in Kings County, Long Island [later Brooklyn] for over two hundred years.” His father ran a farm of corn, peas, lettuce, cabbage, and potatoes, one of the many farms that supplied Manhattan with its daily produce. He debated Darwinian theory and exchanged insects with Strecker. “I wish,” he wrote, “I had money to back you up myself—all praise to a man who carries a ‘hod’ to such an end.”66
Strecker formed a troubled friendship with Neumoegen, a German Jewish immigrant from Frankfurt in 1845 whose collection of butterflies would become, by 1890, the second or third largest to be assembled by an American.67 In the late 1860s, Neumoegen became a stockbroker and arbitrageur on Wall Street and, at the same time, started serious butterfly collecting in the fields and meadows around his wife’s family summer house in northern New Jersey. Some anti-Semitic butterfly men viewed Neumoegen with derision, but he was Strecker’s most prolific correspondent, writing nearly three hundred letters to him over fifteen years. He celebrated their common German heritage, pursued butterflies for the same reasons, and, like Strecker, relied on the U.S. post office as his preferred collecting ground; he wanted “only fresh, intact specimens.”68 Early on, he sent Strecker the usual photograph butterfly men and other naturalists exchanged, his with its handsome, even Byronic, image, “the last one I have and flattering exceedingly,” he had to say. “I am not such an Adonis as the picture makes me out to be, a small fellow of five feet, with eye glasses!”69 Another German immigrant, Julius Meyer, a voice and piano teacher in Brooklyn who competed with Neumoegen over the richness of their collections, considered Neumoegen “a grasping Jew of the worst kind.” “He doesn’t love nature as we do,” Meyer told Strecker. Yet ten years later, when Meyer and others were revitalizing the Brooklyn Entomological Society (created in 1873), he wrote Strecker that two significant members were “Mr. Graef and Neumoegen…good examples of advancing Science.”70
Old-time American naturalists Titian Peale, of Holmesburg, Pennsylvania, and John Morris, of Baltimore, both now in their seventies, fell under the spell of Strecker’s overflowing butterfly devotion. Before Peale died, dirt poor, in 1888, he had hoped to begin a catalog of exotics; he had attempted an earlier version decades before and had failed, because no one then cared about foreign insects.71 By the 1870s, when the competition was stiff, Peale lacked the strength to meet it, but he enjoyed the growing enthusiasm for foreign insects vicariously through Strecker, who reawakened in him “his old love for the beautiful among Butterflies.” “I can readily appreciate your ‘mania,’ ” he wrote Strecker, “being subject to fits of the same kind since infancy.”72 As for Morris, Strecker ha
d known of his butterfly book for years and, in the early 1850s, soon after his return from Mexico, had visited him in Baltimore, making a lifelong friend. In Strecker’s presence again in the 1870s, Morris felt his “old butterfly fever” return in its old ardor, and despite age and sickness, he sugared trees to snare moths for the first time in his life, bred his own butterflies, and did what he called “microscopic studies,” enrolling as a student (!) in the “biology department” of the new Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Strecker invited him to visit Reading, and Morris wrote back, “I look forward with boyish exaltation to the times when I can revel over your collection.”73
Augustus Grote saw little to fault in Strecker’s work or in Strecker, at least at first. In fact, he wanted to stride forth with him, hand in hand, to transform natural science in America, a bond strengthened by a commitment to hard work and by the same Romantic tendencies, the same attraction to beauty. Grote was even more wide-ranging than Strecker (or than Scudder and Edwards, for that matter). In 1876, at age thirty-five, he felt confident speaking and writing on much besides entomology, at once a social critic, a historian of religion, a poet, a musician, and a composer. He appears to have gained knowledge of all these fields mostly on his own, and the ease with which he did so led some to ridicule him—a few called him “His Highness”—but he was always interesting and often brilliant, incorporating much of what he knew into his writing on moths and butterflies, thus giving it a philosophic and idiosyncratic character.