Butterfly People Read online

  Collecting’s cardinal motivation came from natural history, then a vital presence in the lives of Americans barely comprehensible today, when so many people avoid mingling with nature for fear of harming it. Natural history, on the other hand, allowed for the nearly full sway of the sensual drives of human beings. All the butterfly people in this book began their careers in this way, awash in the heat and smells of the meadows and forests, sensitive to something worth losing oneself in, worth knowing, worth a lifetime of vocational loyalty and reflection. “We unceasingly want to know,” Grote observed. “Truth is one, and even a butterfly conceals it, though not, like man, intentionally.”9

  And yet this passion had the potential for harm, even sometimes sabotaging the entire enterprise butterfly people shared. The emotions that brought them to the fields and meadows of butterflies, and that kept them together as a community, often set them against one another, and this was assuredly the case throughout the 1870s, when Americans actually created the beginnings of a mature American science of entomology, one fully competitive with Europe. In this decade opposing camps formed, with opposing “authorities,” journals, and associations in New York, Boston, and elsewhere. Americans got swept up in debates that had long marked the British scene. In the 1840s, members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) attempted to end the flood of names that had followed in the wake of the discovery of a vast range of animal forms; it tried to impose a standardized Latin and Greek on all naming (no vernacular, no local naming) and to exclude all “déclassé naturalists” who lacked “refinement” and insisted upon naming species after “Peruvian princesses and Hottentots.” Thirty years later, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), founded in 1848, inspired by the British, and led from within by a phalanx of entomologists, attempted, too, to standardize systematic practices. Unlike the BAAS, however, the American society was more democratic, its membership open to amateurs and professionals alike; yet many Americans, too, opposed naturalists who acted in “unrefined” ways and refused to swallow the dictates of self-selected elites. It was in the AAAS that William Henry Edwards, Scudder, Grote (Strecker did not join the AAAS, nor did William Henry Edwards for that matter, preferring to operate through proxies), thrashed over matters of core significance to their science. The debate took place as well beyond the AAAS, among all kinds of butterfly people, in journals, letters, clubs, homes, and saloons.10

  “What is there about our science,” inquired William Henry Edwards in 1877 of his friend Joseph Lintner, “that makes one type of men so inflammable, and another rascals and thieves?”11 “Fanatics, bigots, and dogmatists are more common in science than in religion (which is saying a good deal),” wrote George Hulst to Strecker a little later.12 Feuds erupted over every aspect of systematics, with costly consequences. The butterfly people fought, above all, about collecting itself, where it should lead—to science, to beauty, to beauty and science, or to more collecting for the mere sake of amassing. All other issues, however fundamental, were secondary to collecting, because nothing could be gained without it.

  Sometime in early 1875, Herman Strecker got in the post an unusual Brazilian moth from a friend who had bought it from a dealer in Rio de Janeiro. Gray and brown, with long, tapering tails, it seemed to be a member, according to Strecker, of the genus Eudaemonia (the word is from the classical Greek for happiness or contentment), first described under that name by the German naturalist Jacob Hübner sixty years before. Strecker considered it “the most remarkable Lepidopterous in-sect yet known,” a species he was sure had yet to be noticed in America or Europe, having himself examined the existing literature (although not in all languages). He decided to publish a portrait in part 13 of his catalog, Lepidoptera. He called the insect Eudaemonia jehovah.

  There was nothing new about this kind of naming. Ever since Linnaeus and Fabricius in the mid-1700s, naturalists had turned to Latin or Greek for names of all species (they still use Latin this way today). The royalty of the past lived on as butterflies or moths—from Linnaeus’s Morpho menelaus, named for the king of Sparta and husband of Helen of Troy (“morpho” itself is a Greek word for form), to “the dusky red aborigines of America,” the only nobility on the continent, according to Samuel Scudder, who, along with William Henry Edwards and Thaddeus Harris, attached Indian names to numerous skippers, butterflies with thick bodies and short, mostly dull wings (although many are richly colored). Fabricius, a student of Linnaeus’s, named more than fifteen hundred “lepidopteran species,” calling a skipper Hesperia catullus and a striking orange sulphur Appias nero, symbolic of the burning of Rome.13 The Frenchman Pierre Latreille attached the Greek word “Parnassius,” sacred home of the gods, to a lovely genus of alpine butterfly, the parnassians, which “fly around the summit of the sacred mountain of poetry, guarded especially by Apollo himself,” and he coined Colias philodice (the “common sulphur”), the genus after one of Venus’s many names, and the species after the golden maid of honor to Venus.14 And so on and so forth, through the dense thickets of the classical past.

  In choosing Eudaemonia jehovah, Strecker had simply taken the matter a step further, trespassing in foreign territory.15 And he knew what he was doing. A toughened product of an artisan culture, run through the wringer in his youth, he detested most formalities, such as being addressed with “Esquire” after his name. (He told a friend that the term “belongs to loafers, to which paternity I hope I am no kin.”)16 Naming his Brazilian insect after Jehovah, he knew, “would be a fling in the face of the Christian world,” as a friend of his put it.17

  To John Morris, the aging Lutheran cleric who owed his revived butterfly fervor partly to Strecker, the name Jehovah was beyond the pale, even for an ally. He promised to marshal the troops against its acceptance at the 1876 meeting of the AAAS. “You may rest assured,” he warned his friend, that we will “denounce it as irreverent, against all refined taste as well as propriety.” “Such names” should not be “applied to such creatures.”18 George Hulst, also a minister and a Strecker loyalist, pleaded with him to select another name, perhaps “of some warrior female.” “I don’t see how you could help calling it Zenobia or something of the sort unless it was for the same reason a boy jumps into a slough—just to prove that he dares to do it.”19 Charles Dury, a young Cincinnati naturalist, lightly mocked Strecker’s choice by proposing to call one of his own recent discoveries “Jesus christiana,” or “how would satan do?”20 Arthur Fuller, another friend and journalist, opposed Jehovah on wholly pragmatic grounds, because “it hurts your prospects in a money point of view.”21

  Today, there is an almost incoherent general approach to naming, either a lack of confidence in what is named or a demand for labels for every group, nonhuman and human, while, at the same time, few people can identify more than two or three species of birds or butterflies. In the 1870s, when the naming culture was still fresh, Henry Edwards observed that “every schoolboy throughout the country knew that the most common species in America was Colias philodice [the ‘common sulphur’].”22 It mattered what butterflies were called. “Without the groups of [insects] being named,” wrote Hermann Burmeister in his influential 1836 A Manual of Entomology, read by all the American butterfly people, “naturalists could not communicate together, and without a distinction of the known and discovered all would speedily return to its former obscurity.”23 Sometimes naturalists thought up unpronounceable and absurd names alien to most human beings.24 Many pompously behaved as though it were their right to name, or to impose Latinate nomenclature on all natural forms, as if no one before them had ever cared about nature.25 They tended to magnify human claims over nature: designate a thing so that you can find more of it, translate it into wealth, or get rid of it. Yet names served generous and humane purposes as well. Along with the scientific identifying and knowing that came with them, names helped to record and fix in the mind otherwise shadowy beings, making visible the invisible. They affirmed a bond between people and
other organisms where none had previously existed, raising the stature of a species, whether bird, butterfly, or any other natural thing. “You know when you don’t know the names of things,” observed Emily Morton, an heir of Linnaeus’s and an amateur butterfly woman from Newburgh, New York, in 1879, “pages of names are no manner of use to you. I have had very rare [insects] for years and yet I did not know to care anything about them because I did not know what they were.” Three years earlier, another amateur, the tax collector William Holle, from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, told Strecker that “a species without a name and history and description is of no value.” David Bruce, from Brockport, New York, wrote to a friend in 1888 that “I feel much more interested in the things if I know their names.”26

  At the same time, when people like Strecker took such liberties with it, naming caused an uproar, although Strecker professed not to understand the cause. Why all the carping against Eudaemonia jehovah? he asked. Is it because the name invokes the “sacred”? Well, he declared, “if such be the case, then indeed am I happy in my selection, for anything that would lead us to think of the Creator and would take our thoughts away from contemplation of the mimes [imitators] with which he has peopled the earth, cannot but be well. And what better than to reflect on sacred things—on evidences of the majesty and power of the Supreme Being?” Besides, people had used sacred names throughout history for heroes and saints as well as for animals or plants. “In Spanish countries almost every tenth person is surnamed Jesus, pronounced by them Hezoos. This may sound shockingly irreverent to the fastidious ears of Americans, but I doubt much if the Hidalgoes who bear the name of the second person of the Godhead would feel at all elated to know that, on account of their names, they were living offenses against decency and good taste.” There could be no “reasonable objection to the bestowal of the Creator’s name on one of the most interesting of His works,” Strecker argued. Despising hypocrisy, unwilling to yield to anyone in the AAAS, he took shots at those who had named their discoveries after some politician or courtier: “To attach to scientific objects the names of political demagogues is without a doubt, the vilest of all [practices], especially in our own country where political eminence is now solely attained by the most corrupt means, and success ensured only by the sacrifice of every principle of honor and decency.”27 Strecker’s Eudaemonia jehovah held up as a species and still survives, but the controversy he caused led many to suspect his judgment and character.

  In the early 1870s, William Henry Edwards and Samuel Scudder, the innovative Yankees, were allies against the arrogant European and British entomologists. But beginning in summer of 1872, and continuing thereafter, Edwards, relying on members of the AAAS (he himself refused to pay what he thought an exorbitant membership fee), opposed Scudder’s 1872 “Systematic Revision of American Butterflies.” Edwards had read the document earlier in draft form; it had put the swallowtails at the bottom of the classificatory ladder, and it had also resurrected numerous older generic names and created a slew of new genera in accordance with the “law of priority.” Edwards had disparaged these changes privately in letters to Scudder. Now he attacked them openly, persuading the AAAS to reject Scudder’s views in favor of his own. In 1877, Hermann Hagen, a leading AAAS figure, invited Edwards to write a formal retort to Scudder, and Edwards did so, under the title “Catalogue of the Lepidoptera of America North of Mexico.” Edwards reclaimed the system of the British naturalist Edward Doubleday, who in the 1840s had put the swallowtails at the top of the hierarchy of Lepidoptera and the skippers toward the bottom.28

  Edwards had once told Scudder he didn’t really care about classification, and, essentially, he didn’t, just as Scudder, in his heart of hearts, didn’t. What concerned them most was the biology of the butterflies, the way they lived and died, and why they existed at all. “I am indifferent to the matter of arrangement,” Edwards insisted, just as he had when he wrote Scudder around 1870. “I have aimed at studying the stages of the insects and there I have done something that was needed.”29 Yet in his 1877 catalog, he sought to substitute for Scudder’s “arrangement” a more Darwinian biological approach: “A great many systems of arrangement have had their rise and fall within the last half century on one character or other of the imago, and it is safe to say that none will be other than temporary which does not regard the egg, and the larva and chrysalis, as well as the butterfly. And it will be a long time before the knowledge of the Lepidoptera is so complete as to permit of any permanent arrangement.” Moreover, “[i]n the preparatory stages, [the] two families [the swallowtails and the skippers] are as unlike as any of the series. And as to the butterflies themselves, they stand at the two poles.”30 Edwards flinched before what he considered Scudder’s fiatlike imposed laws, conjured up, he thought, from nowhere and expecting universal acquiescence. He was not alone in his criticism. The Brooklyn tailor Fred Tepper wrote Strecker: “I read Mr. Edwards’ criticism on Mr. Scudder’s work with great interest—he treats him rather unmercifully, and with all rights, I think. Scudder’s farfetched and most unreasonable ideas could hardly find favor with men of common sense and the sooner that work is pulled down and completely destroyed, the better for all concerned. We have confusion enough in our line of science, without having additions made by any Tom, Dick, or Harry that wishes to create for himself an immortal name.”31

  Scudder and Edwards looked quite differently at “the face of Nature”; that phrase, in common usage at the time, meant many things.32 But Darwin singled it out in his 1859 On the Origin of Species to mean only one thing: “The face of Nature may be compared to a yielding surface, with ten thousand sharp wedges packed close together and driven inwards by incessant blows, sometimes one wedge being struck, and then another with greater force.”33 In time Scudder would come to see “the face of Nature” in a modified Darwinian form, but not in 1875, when he remained intellectually loyal to his teacher Louis Agassiz, who despised the idea that species “evolved.” We have “different modes of seeing things,” Scudder told Edwards that year. “I do not look upon species, genera, or any other groups, as the devices of man, but, just as far as they are truthfully, as the imprints of a creative mind. The common assent or dissent of naturalists has nothing whatever to do with them—agreement or disagreement of opinion does not alter facts.” He insisted that he did nothing to misrepresent nature. Trained in Agassiz’s morphological methods, resting on comparative analysis of similar animal structures or an understanding of interrelationships, Scudder tried “to see the distinctions impressed on the animals by nature. No doubt I fail sometimes. I claim no shade of infallibility— All I claim is that I am endeavoring to discover the true relationships between the animals I study.” “I am endeavoring to see things as they are and to express that view.”34

  Edwards perceived much of what Darwin saw in the face of nature and dismissed with more scorn and confidence than ever Scudder’s stubborn clinging to Agassiz’s “dogma.” The notion that species and genera emerged “cast-iron” from “the thought of the Creator” or that one family of butterflies was “higher than any other” (as Scudder appeared to believe) “disgusted” Edwards, as he informed Henry Edwards. Today, “scientific men are looking for blood-relationships of species,” not for separate creations. To Theodore Mead, Edwards observed: “If I understand Darwin’s argument, many or all families would radiate from a common center, and be of equal rank to the last.” “Species are forming all the time,” he told his old friend Joseph Lintner in February 1873.35 “The proposition is enunciated by Mr. Darwin,” Edwards wrote in his 1877 catalog, “that ‘distinct species present analogous variations, and a variety of one species often assumes some of the characters of an early progenitor.’ And what is true of species is true of genera and families.” But what of Scudder’s search for structural or morphological “relationships” among animals? Surely it could be carried on—and was carried on by Edwards and other butterfly people—without adopting the evolutionary argument as a necessity.36 Edwards was no
t in a conciliatory mood, and he could not tolerate what he considered Scudder’s many other generalizations based on limited data, such as “all caterpillars, after hatching out, eat their shells,” or “all swallowtails and lycaenids should be classified together because their caterpillars have retractable heads.” What upset him most was the word “all.” How could Scudder speak of all swallowtails or all retractable heads? Why not “perhaps all” or “probably all” or “many” or “most”? Scudder “is a well-trained naturalist with a kink in his head,” Edwards wrote Henry Edwards.37

  The depth of Edwards’s opposition came partly from a man who had spent hours, days, even months in the field or around his property, looking at the slow, grudging molting of thousands of larvae and at the wiggles and twitches of countless numbers of pupae, tedious beyond imagining, making Edwards intolerant of those who, like Scudder, spent too much time in a room peering through a compound microscope.38 Ironically, of course, Scudder had watched and struggled in the same way (although he never knew the field as Edwards did); he’d attached a heated laboratory to his home for purposes of constant viewing. But he did not go at the throats of his competitors in quite the lecturing way Edwards did.

  Edwards had an explosive temper, to the chagrin of many of his friends, and by the late 1870s, his tone had ceased to be friendly. He did whatever he could to get others to disparage Scudder’s ideas in print, while he stayed behind the curtain, enjoying the spectacle. Theodore Mead performed this service willingly, as did others such as Selim Peabody, a New England naturalist and insect generalist who would become nationally renowned in the early 1890s, for co-organizing the Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1893. Peabody wrote children’s nature books after the Civil War, under the series title of Cecil’s Books of Natural History, named after his own son, Cecil, and in Cecil’s Book of Insects, he celebrated butterfly caterpillars as the source of “wings of beautiful form, exquisite coloring, and most delicate plumage.” He had a collection of American butterflies big enough to put on display at an “exposition” in the Chicago Academy of Sciences, where he was a member and later president.39 Edwards respected Peabody and backed up his dismissal of Scudder’s vernacular names in the Canadian Entomologist. “Scudder,” Peabody argued, “is seized with a certain Adamic afflatus, and begins the work of naming afresh. [He has, for instance,] dubbed Danais Archippus the Monarch, [because it lives supposedly longer than any other butterfly, but if that were really the case,] and its longevity were proven, then the insect might be called Patriarch, as Mr. Edwards suggests.”40