Butterfly People Read online

  Born around the same time as Linnaeus (1707), the Comte de Buffon, famous for his spellbinding, multivolume Histoire naturelle, was determined to cover all animal and plant life, to a degree far beyond Linnaeus. He was critical of Linnaean systematics and of the early Enlightenment, which he thought viewed nature as too fixed in its forms and development. To Buffon, natural organisms or species flowed in “a progression” that changed constantly through almost imperceptible “gradations,” self-creating and self-propelled.15 He considered “Nature” an immense living empire, enfolding everything, animating everything, and urged naturalists to deal always with living organisms and to write their “life histories,” describing fully and exactly every feature of their existence: their distribution, their outside and inside anatomies, their peculiar habits and everyday activities, their relationships with the life histories of other beings and to the surrounding environment. Species could not be recognized, Buffon argued, only on the basis of single visible sexual features, as was Linnaeus’s practice.16

  Although historians have often seen these two sides of natural history as separate and even at odds, the two so often crossed as to form a whole perspective that grew ever more complex over time.17 Buffon and Linnaeus shared a belief that humans had a primary right to use nature, first and foremost, for their material benefit; each insisted upon the necessity of describing as well as naming and classifying; both saw the natural world as an interdependent whole; and each was awed by its profusion. “The starting point,” Linnaeus wrote, “must be to marvel at all things, even the most commonplace.”18 Still, rightly or wrongly, Linnaeus’s fame rested on his binomial nomenclature and Buffon’s on his descriptive talents, on the abundance of his engrossing life histories, and on his dramatic ecological vision, which addressed “the great operations of nature” and demanded a “quality of mind that permits us to grasp distant relationships, fit them together, and form a body of rational ideas.”19

  Buffon’s version of natural history reached a zenith of influence during the Romantic Enlightenment of the early nineteenth century, most memorably in the mind of Alexander Humboldt, a Prussian aristocrat and the premier explorer of the time, whose multivolume masterpiece, The Cosmos, written in his old age and probing nearly every aspect of the universe, had a more profound impact on American views of nature than any other book in the nineteenth century. Humboldt journeyed down the mostly unexamined (for Europeans) Orinoco River in present-day Venezuela between 1799 and 1804, launching the “cartographic penetration of the continental interiors of the Americas.” The trip culminated in Ecuador with Humboldt’s sensational ascent with his companions—the botanist Aimé Bonpland, his Ecuadorian friend Carlos Montúfar, and an Indian guide—nearly to the top of Mount Chimborazo, an Andean peak then thought the highest in the world. Besides harvesting a huge number of plants, Bonpland and Humboldt collected butterflies, including one delicate but hardy creature above the snow zone—a yellow or sulphur species one inch in diameter (Colias alticola)—and two new species later named and described in 1805 by the French butterfly man Pierre Latreille as Heliconius humboldt and Cethosia bonpland.20 Despite these discoveries, Humboldt, like Buffon, had no desire, as he put it, to unearth “new, isolated facts” but “preferred linking always known ones together.” Also, as with Buffon, he was convinced that “nature, despite her seeming diversity, is always a unity, a whole,” and that a “holy, creative, primary force” suffused all.21 Nature was no “inert mass” but “an inextricable network of organisms,” so gloriously fertile in places around the globe that it promised to endure forever.

  A half century later, Charles Darwin’s theories of natural selection and evolution (along with those of his countryman, Alfred Russel Wallace) would add a radically dynamic element to natural history thinking, conceiving of nature as an always evolving and unstable realm, working from within to create a new abundance of variable shapes, patterns, colors, and sizes: geographic, polymorphic (meaning many forms), and dimorphic (meaning double forms), and encompassing varieties, species, and subspecies—altogether a morphological spectrum never before revealed to naturalists in the same way or to the same degree.

  The natural history of these men erected a route to scientific understanding and knowledge. At the same time, it occasionally mixed culture, fantasy, and myth with science; it sometimes treated nature anthropomorphically, told stories, and had literary as well as scientific content; and, most of all, it placed people in touch with the multifarious beauty of the world.

  Throughout most of the nineteenth century, naturalists typically learned to draw or paint and, therefore, possibly to see and appreciate better the living beauty around them. We can trace this fruitful relationship to an abiding alliance between art and science, with roots in the late medieval period (if not earlier), when it was commonly held that the ability to pursue art or science depended on the same observational skills and perceptions, the same pair of eyes. This view can be seen in the work of Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Hooker, and William Harvey, among others, and found exponents in the late-eighteenth-century philosophy of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schelling, and many of their contemporaries.22 It was an outlook, moreover, characteristic of a venerable tradition of artisan craftsmanship practiced by a large community of people outside the elite bastions of science who conjured up images with their own hands, a practice that helped increase the observer’s sensitivity and responsiveness to the aesthetic character of nature.23

  In its heyday, natural history unleashed a stream of pictorial books of insects and other species, with handcrafted plates notable for their costliness as well as for their lively colors, although these sometimes bore little relation to the actual colors of the butterflies and moths depicted. In the early eighteenth century, the German-born apothecary Albertus Seba, then living in Amsterdam, published the four-volume Cabinet of Curiosities, a great prototypic catalog, with hundreds of exotic butterflies never before seen. Almost all of the copies were printed in black-and-white; those few that used color were set aside for the tiny royalty of northern Europe who were Seba’s benefactors.24 Other contemporary works with plates, by such people as the Germans Maria Sibylla Merian and August Rösel von Rosenhof and the Dutchman Pieter Cramer, also served a small elite.25 By the early nineteenth century, both craftsmanship and natural science had overcome the obstacles of poorly executed shades and tints and of an exclusive market. Starting with the rise of lithography in the 1820s, artists and artisans began to depict the real thing in realistic color, and the audience was no longer elite.

  Buffon, Darwin, and Humboldt themselves seemed indifferent to drawing lines between art and science. Their prose was often excellent and readable, so much so as to later seem unscientific. They often wrote on behalf of the artistic attractions of nature. “It is certain that natural history is the mother of all arts,” Buffon affirmed. “All ideas of the arts have their models in the productions of nature. God created and man imitates.”26 Although no naturalist had more faith in empirical science than Humboldt, he embraced “the ancient bond which unites natural science and artistic feeling.” He also rejoiced in the beauty of nature as perceived through the medium of human subjectivity: “For it is the inward mirror of the sensitive mind which reflects the true and living image of the natural world. All that determines the character of a landscape are in antecedent mysterious communion with the inner feelings and life of man.”27 Humboldt believed that anyone without the ability to see beauty would probably also be unable to see the chain of connections underlying nature.28

  Such a perspective on the natural world, lasting well into the nineteenth century, would be weakened by many changes, ranging from the professionalization of science and the attendant insistence on a rigid separation of art from science, to the invention of photography, which struck a blow at the human hand as the maker and shaper of images.29 Still, it held up (however hobbled) and finds advocates from all walks of life in the present day.

  Natural history,
at a very high point in its popularity, made a vigorous claim on the culture of the United States, not least because of the near diffusion of wealth and “comfort” throughout the countryside and because of American educational levels. By the early 1800s, the white population in the United States was already the most literate, the most competent, and the best educated in the world. In the 1830s, for the first time anywhere, women could read and write as well as men could. Both achievements derived from the spread of common schools, the presence of lending libraries everywhere, a vital free press, and an egalitarian ideology that opened up the study of nature to all who cared to pursue it.30 As a consequence, from the 1810s on, Linnaean societies, natural history clubs, and small college societies appeared in city after city, followed by the rise of natural history museums, where people might see illustrated books of lepidoptera, as well as of other colorful natural life. Improved printing presses aided in the production of books and periodicals on butterflies and moths, while the railroads safely and rapidly delivered countless specimens in the mails and multiplied the locations where butterfly people debated, fought over ideas and membership, and set standards in naming and classification. Photography, in a special way, tied these naturalists into a community.31 From the 1850s on, butterfly people mailed thousands of letters to one another, and requests for photographs became a ritual part of their letter writing, a kind of Masonic testimony to a seemingly invisible presence. We “meet in the shadow of the camera,” Benjamin Walsh, an Illinois naturalist, put it to his friend Hermann Hagen of the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.32

  America produced many gifted butterfly people, all of whom deserve today to be much better known, beneficiaries of Linnaeus, Buffon, Humboldt, and Darwin and, in time, serious rivals of the English and Europeans in creativity. These butterfly people, in turn, depended on an even greater mass of Americans from all stations and classes, many willing to serve the leading figures in virtually any way so that they might have the insects they required to describe, figure, and identify. America was full of such people, their existence a measure of the vitality of American culture at midcentury. Augustus Grote called them “hod carriers,” and himself and others like him “boss masons,” where today “amateur” and “professional” describe such roles. “Amateur” means, literally, anyone who does something for the love of it; by the 1880s that commanded a lot of ground, since it was true of both professionals and amateurs. It did not imply, however, working for someone else in a self-sacrificing kind of way. “Hod carrier” and “boss mason” came closer to this latter meaning, and closer to the experiences of people involved with butterflies. At the time, many men actually carried hods (trays of bricks) for boss masons in the building trades ubiquitous throughout the country, and many were on their way to becoming boss masons of some sort themselves, artisans with the skill to give, with their own hands, shape, form, and color to the world around them and, very likely because of those skills, to see beauty in nature.33 Herman Strecker himself was one of these people, a talented sculptor and designer of decorative objects who started out as a hod carrier, or apprentice, literally bearing bricks for his boss mason father, Ferdinand Strecker. He ended up as an actual boss mason (although he owned a marble yard for only a short period of time) and with a highly sophisticated eye for the beauty of lepidoptera.

  In America before 1880, one might begin as a hod carrier who imagined becoming a boss mason, despite a lack of formal education, by spending time under the tutelage of someone of more learning and experience—a boss mason, in other words. The terms were so common as to have passed into metaphors by the period in which Grote used them for the butterfly men. “There is no ‘hod carrier’ who don’t think he would be a good ‘boss mason,’ and as this is a free country, if he wants to try it, who can hinder?” a young George Hulst told Herman Strecker in 1876. (By 1900, Hulst would be a respected authority on American moths.)34 On the other hand, there were other Americans who were neither boss masons or hod carriers but merely people attracted by lepidoptera, eager to collect them and to know everything about them; these people belonged, very likely, to the biggest and most impressive community of all.

  There is no way of accurately measuring the size of this last community, although without it there would certainly have been no hod carriers and no boss masons. The leading butterfly people in America, in fact, emerged out of this community. Each worked hard to reach their goals, and each came from backgrounds shaped in a classic American mold, utilitarian and Romantic about nature at the same time. William Henry Edwards was a coal mine manager who brought the coal business to West Virginia, Herman Strecker a stonecutter who specialized in gravestones for children, and Augustus Grote the musical son of a failed real estate investor and railroad entrepreneur from Staten Island. William Doherty’s father founded the trolley car business in Ohio, and Samuel Scudder was the child of a Boston hardware merchant and at first had little interest in “winged wanderers on clover sweet.” All of them would come to study the “life and death” of butterflies, observing especially life cycles and ecologies rather than the “dry bones” of taxonomy and nomenclature, although as new claimants to the Linnaean mantle, they would fight bitterly over the merits of naming and classifying. What is a name? And who has the right to name or classify? They led other naturalists in the country, too, in absorbing evolutionary thought into their work. And they considered beauty as part of what mattered in nature—ever present, intrinsic, and inescapable, one might suppose, given the splendor they found here and abroad. Edwards, Scudder, Grote, Strecker, and Doherty—these are the key figures of this history, as is another individual, a man far less admirable than the rest. The son of self-sacrificing Moravian Christian missionaries, William Holland was, ironically, a self-serving autocrat, an unsavory opportunist who, after becoming the first director of the new Carnegie Museum of Natural History, in Pittsburgh, would affect the lives of all the other butterfly people. Though he would do some good, he would also help to undermine the promise of a great tradition.

  The reigning perspective on nature in America, from the colonial period on, was economic. At the same time, natural history, with its strong aesthetic dimension, existed side by side with the economic approach and, for a short time, made room for many Americans to think and dream about butterflies independent of any material purpose or inclination, and persuading some to make riveting observations concerning the beauty of the world. Today, most Americans come to know nature through technology and the commercial market—through television, computer screens, motion pictures, advertising, and tourism (including ecotourism), or through public institutions that have become wholly or partly commercialized, such as zoos, game preserves, aquariums, botanical gardens, national parks, and even natural history museums. One hundred fifty years ago, family farming, hunting, amateur exploring, and, above all, natural history in its heyday, with its loyalty to the pleasures of collecting, introduced untold numbers of Americans to nature, freely, and in nearly unscripted ways. In our time, butterfly nets have virtually vanished from the American scene, after years of attacks on collecting as insensitive and destructive to nature. This assault may have been a good thing, although nothing seems to be replacing collecting as a way to instill in children a passion for the natural world. In the earlier age, Americans chased butterflies and butterflies coaxed them on, improving their minds, altering the way they lived and what they lived for, weaving into the American cultural fabric yet another thread of democratic life.

  Part One

  ENCOUNTERS WITH THE BUTTERFLIES OF AMERICA

  ONE

  Yankee Butterfly People

  Carl Linnaeus of Sweden left a tremendous legacy of naming to American butterfly naturalists. In the mid-1700s, at the peak of the renascence of European natural history, he selected the names for the different stages of insect metamorphosis still in use today and applicable to butterflies. He chose “larva,” meaning “mask” in Latin, or a form hiding the true identity
of something—in this case, the adult butterfly, and more commonly known as a caterpillar. He adopted “pupa,” meaning “doll” in Latin, or an “infant in swaddling clothes,” otherwise called a chrysalis, or the stage when the insect “sleeps” until it reemerges as the “perfect butterfly.” And he penned “imago,” meaning “image” in Latin for the “perfect insect” at the final stage of the life cycle.1 Linnaeus coined the word “lepidoptera.” He also assumed the task of naming American species and, along with his favorite student, the Dane Johann Fabricius, identified a great many butterflies, despite having never visited the places where they existed (their students, whom they sent abroad, bore the brunt of that burden).2 The original descriptions and Latin names for the monarch butterfly and the tiger and spicebush swallowtails are among their progeny. Pieter Cramer, wealthy Dutch wool merchant with worldwide contacts, especially in port cities, was the first to describe (and to draw in color) the Diana fritillary and the zebra swallowtail. Pierre Latreille, a French priest who studied butterflies in prison during the French Revolution and later left the church to win acclaim as a bug expert, published portraits of America’s common clouded sulphur and barred sulphur.

  This European domination in the butterfly world held into the next century. At the forefront was the French physician Jean Baptiste Boisduval, who wrote two volumes on American butterflies, the first over an eight-year period ending in 1837, with the help of John Le Conte of Philadelphia, reflecting knowledge gained since Linnaeus’s day, and the second, in the 1860s, on Californian insects, with help from Pierre Lorquin, one of his patients. A rugged young lawyer, Lorquin was, like Boisduval, self-taught in natural science, and capable of walking many miles in an afternoon.3 In the 1840s, what began for Lorquin as a search for Californian gold became a quest for butterflies in the gold fields; many prizes were quickly identified by Boisduval. Among them are the western tiger and pale swallowtails, the Lorquin’s admiral, or Limenitis lorquini, and the California dogface, a dimorphic sulphur—the male black, yellow, and violet, the female all yellow; today it is the state’s insect.4