Butterfly People Page 5
Edwards was hardly the first to breed. As long as people had been able to find eggs that had not been parasitized, they’d bred lepidoptera, but almost always to get perfect adult specimens for their collections. In the interest of identifying species correctly, Edwards put breeding on an entirely new footing. In 1870, he discovered how to get eggs from any butterfly, by placing gravid, or pregnant, females in safe containers full of the caterpillar’s correct food plant—presto, eggs, the females often “laying all they have at once,” not a few at a time as “in Nature.” His method, the crucial beginning for knowing any insect’s life history, set Edwards apart from the Europeans, who “did not understand how to get butterfly eggs,” he told a leading German entomologist, who agreed with him.67 Edwards converted his own home (basement, porches, clothes closets) and land around it into a nursery, with larvae and pupae stuck on or in virtually every spot—in pots, kegs, barrels, and half-pint jelly glasses with tin tops, and even in his bedroom, where butterflies sometimes pupated, freed by the heat of the fireplaces to fly from room to room. Edwards installed a heated greenhouse in which to grow plants and breed insects.68
Shortly after the Civil War, Edwards became a biographer of lepidoptera, with many of his letters and articles repeating the refrain “to get the whole story” from egg to adult, birth to death, with special scrutiny of the larval stage as a way to identify species; no one—except Samuel Scudder, who would one day acknowledge Edwards’s contributions—would match him; and it took nearly another one hundred years for life histories to become common practice.69 Around the same time, Edwards became an ardent Darwinian. Neither God nor any other being made species, he held; rather, nature did that, gradually, through struggle and chance over many years.70 Edwards believed completely that species existed in nature (otherwise why write books about them): they reproduced only with their own kind and with no other, they reappeared again and again with little significant change, and they could be recognized, indisputably, in breeding. On the other hand, Edwards also believed that species were not permanent things, that as some emerged and held their own, others failed to adapt, weakened, and died. Variation and instability, not fixity of species, captured Edwards’s imagination, as they did other naturalists who fell under the spell of Darwin’s 1859 On the Origin of Species.71 “I am out and out a Darwinian,” he wrote Scudder in 1875, long after his conversion.72 “I think with Darwin,” he explained to Henry Edwards, “that greater interest attaches to varieties than to well-defined species.… To a Darwinian, there is no such thing as a ‘bona species,’ except for convenience sake, for the systematist.”73
America had undergone great changes since the death of Edwards’s ancestor Jonathan Edwards. In the mid-eighteenth century, Jonathan Edwards had enlisted Newton’s science on the side of God’s sovereignty. Now William Henry, his great-grandson, turned to science to banish God from heaven. Certainly William’s early estrangement from religion—his disgust, really, with Calvinism—helped prepare the way, as did the larger, ever more secular capitalist culture he lived in, one saturated in change, in capitalist markets replacing older customs, in people moving across continents, in nations formed and forming, in America’s becoming. And yet Calvinism itself, inadvertently, may have watered the ground for evolutionary ideas. Wasn’t there some similarity between the Calvinist Edwardsian soul, in its quest for conversion always susceptible to backsliding and mistaken interpretation, and the anti-Calvinist Edwardsian species, evolving amid great uncertainty, known for sure only—though never totally—after searching investigation?
Whatever the similarities, Edwards was heir to a new scientific culture, enhanced in England partly by Henry Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace and principally by Darwin, and strengthened in America by Edwards’s contact with Benjamin Walsh, an agnostic, like Edwards, whose evolutionary gusto may have exceeded that of all other early American naturalists.74
Walsh, Wallace, and Bates all studied insects (and Bates and Wallace, in particular, butterflies) as a way to elucidate the operation of evolutionary change. Their influence was far-reaching on Edwards and on the understanding of insects in America generally, helping to establish entomology as one of the most advanced and dynamic scientific fields in the country.
Walsh was educated at Cambridge University in the same class with Darwin. He emigrated in 1838 and bought a three-hundred-acre farm in Rockville, Illinois, working it with his wife and making every necessary tool or item by himself, from his shoes to his horse’s harness. At the age of forty-nine, he began to study insects. He developed a new kind of economic entomology as a service to farmers and until he died, in 1869 at sixty-one, edited the first journal on the subject, Practical Entomologist. Walsh singled out “seeing” as the signature of a true naturalist, and with eyes like laser beams, he rapidly became aware of all the various life-forms in Illinois and surrounding places. He learned, for instance, that one of America’s most handsome butterflies, the female eastern tiger swallowtail (Papilio glaucus) came in two forms, one mostly yellow that flew in the North and another, mostly black, that flew in the South. The Europeans and English considered these two independent species, but Walsh confirmed beyond doubt what two other Americans in the 1830s (John Ridings and George Newman, both of Philadelphia) had already suspected—that they were the same species, simply in dimorphic form. Walsh had adopted Darwinism in 1861, or two years after On the Origin of Species was published, and while many British and American naturalists denounced the book for its speculative and anti-religious character, Walsh defended it. His work on insects formed a key conduit through which ideas about evolution and natural selection would pass into American thinking about nature.75
Edwards and Walsh corresponded from the early 1860s, trading insects and ideas, Edwards sending so many letters that Walsh had no time to respond to all of them.76 It was from Walsh, and perhaps from reading Comte de Buffon, that Edwards very likely heard of a “new” biological definition of species, one later espoused by the twentieth-century naturalist Ernst Mayr. “My definition of a specific distinctness,” Walsh wrote, “is when two forms that coexist do not freely intercross or when we may infer from analogy that if they coexisted they would not intercross.”77 Walsh was fascinated with variation and the mutability, as was Alfred Russel Wallace, the cofounder of the theory of evolution.78 Focusing on butterflies, Wallace introduced the concepts of polymorphism and dimorphism into natural science, dwelling on sexual dimorphism, or the different forms males and females of the same species take, and on seasonal polymorphism, or the many forms the same insect might take as a result of the impact of changing day length and temperature (today this form of variation is called polyphemism).79 Both Walsh’s and Wallace’s thinking on the wealth of natural forms, as well as Darwin’s and Bates’s on the variability of species, would prepare the way for Edwards’s breakthroughs, and when Walsh died unexpectedly in 1869, after being struck by a train, Edwards felt the loss deeply; “well nigh irreparable to American entomology,” he wrote.80
Volume 1 of Edwards’s Butterflies of North America marked a new turn in the natural history of butterflies. But for all of Edwards’s hymns to caterpillars, almost no “preparatory stages” were depicted in it, since for many species, with food plants still a mystery, successful breeding of females was impossible. “It is a matter of regret,” Edwards conceded, “that, in so few instances, I shall be able to say anything about the larvae. Even among our old and common species, the larvae are but little known.”81 Moreover, the full potential of Edwards’s Darwinian analysis would not be realized until the publication of his brilliant volume 2, in 1884. Nevertheless, there were at least two occasions in volume 1 where he did combine his new Darwinism and breeding to illuminate the complex nature of American butterflies. The first came late in his research for volume 1, so spectacular that he began the book with it: three remarkable color plates by Peart and Bowen of the full life history of the zebra swallowtail, a graceful black-striped species with brilliant vermilion spo
ts at the base of the forewings and vermilion slashes on the underwings. According to Edwards, the zebra swallowtail illustrated seasonal polymorphism in a stunning way: a smaller and slightly green-tinged form in the spring, and two larger, black-and-white forms in the summer. The Europeans and the British, looking only at adults, had assumed they were different species. Edwards, scanning his own property, had doubts; pawpaw bushes, the larval food plant, bedecked the river side of his mountain, with zebras cruising up and down in the spring to visit his gardens and the peach and plum trees near the woods. By 1867, when Edwards had bred them from larvae, he suspected these three forms were one, and in 1870, he nailed it down with his new method and hundreds of eggs—indeed, the summer form of the zebra produced the spring form. A year later, he confirmed that the third form yielded all three, thus proving that the zebra, a single species, had three seasonal incarnations.82
Edwards noticed the same thing in a common species of angle-wing butterfly known as the question mark (because its hind wings carry a little marking that resembles one). It flew in two forms, one with reddish wings, the other with black, and here again, mesmerized by the wings, naturalists abroad had misidentified the two forms either as varieties of one species or two separate species. Breeding from a single batch of eggs, Edwards realized that the adult butterflies had both red and black wings; hence they were not separate species or varieties but seasonally dimorphic forms of the same butterfly.83 Another angle-wing had more than two colors. Taking the Darwinian view, Edwards conjectured that the multiple forms, if left apart from one another for long enough and, therefore, unable to interbreed, might result in new species.84
Edwards’s early years were defined in part by his virtual isolation in West Virginia. Nearly everything moved by stagecoach, with rivers sometimes choked by mud, snow, or debris; he could not send living things (especially larvae) over the Appalachian mountains to Philadelphia, where his artists worked. “In this remote corner of Virginia,” he wrote a friend, “the mails are often ten days from New York or Philadelphia.”85 His coal business was a burden. “I have a thousand things to think of, this year more than ever,” he wrote Samuel Scudder in August 1871, “and how to find any time at all for the butterflies is a mystery to myself.”86 And the expenses of the book took a toll, more so due to its size (twelve inches by nine, almost folio), its artistic demands (color pictures done by hand), its limited print run, and its consequently high price. He bore the cost himself, paying his artists and the artisans in Philadelphia out of his own pocket and getting subscribers to sign up for installments. He burned all the expense records, lest anyone learn what he had really spent.87 The labor, he wrote, in the book’s preface, was “one of love,” and he expected no “remuneration … in a pecuniary sense.”
Yet Edwards finished his first volume, and he did so with all the strengths he brought to it: his personal wealth (if dwindling), the excellence of his artists and of his own natural science, and his zeal. But there was another reason for his success. Edwards tried to do most of the hard fieldwork himself, especially in very local areas (Coalburgh, West Virginia, and Hunter, New York). But as the demands of his coal business grew on him, he began to proselytize, just as Jonathan Edwards had proselytized, albeit in a different line: William Henry Edwards began to inspire all sorts of people—the earliest of his hod carriers—to work on his behalf.
Thus, John Burke, the Irish-American manager of Edwards’s mine workers, found caterpillars Edwards had never seen before, and Burke’s daughter, Jenny, captured swallowtails and blues along Paint Creek.88 The members of the family of Dick Fraser, a prosperous farmer and the owner of what Edwards called Fraser’s swamp, a living laboratory for Edwards’s work on local species, netted “perfect” Diana fritillaries in the mid-1860s, as well as an unusual female tiger swallowtail, half black and half yellow, “divided equally down the back,” which was later picked by Edwards for an illustration in volume 2.89 One Fraser son found larvae of the baltimore checkerspot (Euphydryas phaeton) in thick clusters on Chelone (the food plant of the butterfly) and harvested them for Edwards, helping to launch an investigation that was to last for years. (Edwards announced the Fraser discovery in the Canadian Entomologist and concluded with a magnificent life history in volume 2 of The Butterflies of North America.)90 When one of his sisters visited Florida, Edwards armed her with a net and a “bottle of alcohol” to get monarch butterfly larvae, and he asked another sister, from Clifton Springs, New York, to undertake experiments in her icehouse—“temp 40 degrees all year round and dry”—on the impact of cold on butterfly development. Edwards’s oldest daughter, Edith, watched over caterpillars and pupae whenever her father left home and, with her mother, Catherine, drew pictures of insects at his request. He taught butterfly care and breeding to Wesley Bowles, a black stableboy, after observing signs that he was an “incipient naturalist,” and in 1870 let him care for “the larvae hatched from the eggs” of a seasonal form of the zebra swallowtail; a year later, Wesley had become “so expert” that Edwards decided to “keep him at it.”91
Theodore Mead. Department of College Archives and Special Collections, Olin Library, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida.
The finest hod carriers of all to serve Edwards for volume 1 were so talented as to achieve the status of excellent naturalists. Benjamin Walsh, of course, was among them, but two others—Theodore Mead and Henry Edwards—were nearly as gifted. Born in 1854, Ted Mead was William Henry Edwards’s chosen successor; he grew up at 674 Madison Avenue in Manhattan, two blocks east of the newly created Central Park; his father, a wholesale grocery merchant, had moved the family to the East Side from Fishkill, New York, in 1857. Henry Edwards, an English-born actor, was the most good-hearted individual in the entire history of butterfly people, American or otherwise. The naturalist David Bruce called him “the most unselfish man I knew.”92
Mead shared with William Henry Edwards a seventeenth-century colonial ancestry, a family enthusiasm for abolitionism and women’s rights (he went with his mother to hear a young feminist firebrand, Anna Dickinson, lecture in Manhattan), a like-minded religious heritage, and, as he grew older, a comparable aversion to the church world of his parents.93 As a teenager, Mead was fluent in French and German, with impeccable manners, but like so many naturalists of this age, he hunted, killed, and skinned birds as if it were second nature to him. Once, he so bungled the taxidermy as to be left with only the skull of the bird, which he “boiled” and mailed to his friend Willie Edwards, son of William Henry Edwards. An amateur photographer, he experimented on domestic cats, killing and beheading them and then dipping their skulls in photographic silver to produce negatives. In 1875, his younger brother Sam accidentally killed himself with a gun loaded with “explosive bullets” of his own invention capable of “deranging the internal economy” of a large predator. But before these things occurred, Mead happily joined Sam in target practice, shooting at dead trees in northern New Jersey in the winter to watch the wood shatter “into splinters as long as a man’s arm.”94
Mead collected tropical fish and exotic ornamental plants, especially orchids—all new to the New York scene in the 1870s—but his “essential favorites” were the butterflies. He had begun hunting them at twelve and became such an aficionado that he impressed Albert Bickmore, the director of the new American Museum of Natural History, founded in 1869 and at first located in Central Park within easy walking distance of Mead’s home. In 1872 Bickmore appointed Mead, then eighteen, “acting curator” of entomology, a nonpaying position that, nevertheless, invested Mead with the authority to purchase all the insects and to classify them “precisely” as to “date of capture” and “locality.”95 “I am the only person at the American Museum,” Mead told another butterfly man, Herbert Morrison, “who knows anything about insects.”96 Three years earlier, Mead had read about William Henry Edwards in the magazines, which inspired him to write Edwards directly, inquiring about where best to catch butterflies within five hundred miles of New Yor
k City. Edwards replied that Coalburgh was the perfect place and invited Mead to visit; Mead soon arrived, stayed a whole summer, and charmed everyone, especially Edwards’s sixteen-year-old son, Willie—or “darling Willie,” as Mead came to call him, affirming his “love” in letter after letter, while often at the same time boasting of how many birds he’d killed or cats skinned. Mead learned about butterfly breeding from Willie’s father, became a skilled tracker of their life histories, and spent nearly all his time on the lookout for butterflies around Coalburgh, through what he called Edwards’s “terrestrial and entomological paradise.”97 What began as a service to Mead ended as a bonanza for Edwards, as Mead made one surprising find after another, most notably the chrysalis of the Diana fritillary, a mystery to everyone up to that time.98
Mead idolized Edwards, convinced he was the most advanced entomologist of the day. Edwards, in turn, was awed by Mead’s talents. “Mead is as great a collector as lives, remarkably quick of eye and hand, and overlooks nothing,” Edwards told Scudder. To Henry Edwards he wrote: “I think Mead may make an eminent naturalist, and he begins by being a wonderful collector.”99 Even as he aged, Edwards prided himself on doing his own fieldwork, both locally and in Hunter, New York, where he was born. The thought of going West to “collect for myself” and “to gain more knowledge of the larvae” always thrilled him. But as he got to know young Theodore Mead better, he began to consider seriously sharing with him the excitement of field exploration. “When I can get a young friend like Mead here,” he explained to Henry Edwards, “I can see with his eyes, and hunt with his net, quite as well as if I had myself.”100 To Mead himself he wrote, “Tell your father this is my opinion. One of these days I hope you might take up the Butterflies of North America where I leave it, and continue it.”101 Their mutual admiration may have taken a toll on Willie, Edwards’s only son, who, with little interest in butterflies, felt left out and jealous, and even subtly vindictive, while professing persuasively to be Mead’s “best chum.” As he grew older he began to draw Mead away from butterflies, and from biology in general. “We were fond of one another, and Willie had a great influence with me,” Mead wrote in his autobiography, “He was very urgent that I should do something more practical than butterfly collecting.”102 With Willie’s encouragement, Mead followed Willie to Cornell University, joined his fraternity, and majored in engineering.