Butterfly People Page 6
In the spring of 1871, Edwards arranged for Mead to join a government exploratory expedition to the Colorado Rockies and places westward, its purpose to case the natural riches of the mountains, butterflies included. The two planned to divide the expense and the insects, but Mead knew the real benefits would accrue to the older man.103 The summer journey had its dangers—angry Indians near the collecting spots, gray wolves at the higher reaches, and many icy-cold nights. But for the most part the experience was a lark, a joy without pain, for Mead and his companion, his only brother, Sam. There were stage routes dotted with comfortable lodging facilities serving good food, settlers all around and visible, and railroad lines from Chicago to Denver, with sleeping berths and dining rooms to carry the boys to the edge of the wilderness of Colorado. The Meads sometimes rode horses and built their own snug wigwams, wrapping themselves in blankets by the fire. While Sam “popped his Winchester” all over the place, Ted pursued tinier game, catching one specimen at so high an altitude that he “had to lie down frequently to regain his breath.”104 A boon for Edwards, the expedition gushed a stream of butterflies: seven hundred by July 4 and three thousand by December 5.105 Mead unearthed twenty new species of butterflies, all ending up in volume 1 of Edwards’s Butterflies of North America, most brilliant of all a fiery orange sulphur Edwards named in Mead’s honor, Colias meadii, which Mead thought “one of the prettiest butterflies on the continent.”106 In 1875, the ex–cat killer discovered, on Edwards’s lands in Hunter, New York, and Coalburgh, West Virginia, the food plants of the pearl crescent and comma butterflies (Phyciodes tharos and Polygonia comma, respectively), permitting Edwards to breed the full life histories of both. On another trip west, Mead did the same for the western tiger swallowtail (Papilio rutulus), “getting twenty eggs of Rutulus, the best find of the season,” as William Edwards reported glowingly to Henry Edwards.107
In San Francisco, Mead met the butterfly man Henry Edwards, then on the stage in the Manhattan Theater, one of the city’s leading companies, and Edwards “loaded him down with butterflies” from his own “magnificent collection,” as Mead called it, an unexpected act of generosity.108 The actor treated others in the same way, bestowing a wealth of “diurnals” (day-flying Lepidoptera) on the young California collector and lawyer Charles McGlashan. “I shall not forget your kindness in robbing your own cabinet to swell mine,” McGlashan wrote. After finding out that Samuel Scudder studied skippers, Edwards assured him that “I will do all and anything in my power to be of service to you—with great pleasure I will send you all the species I have.”109
Henry Edwards.
Henry Edwards was born in England in 1827 and, as a very young man, he had tried to satisfy his parents by clerking in a London commercial house. But he had loathed it and, for relief and with unexpected delight (but to his family’s disgust), had joined the theater. He also studied natural history, learned taxidermy, enlisted in the relevant societies, and may have collected insects for Edward Doubleday.110 In 1853, fed up with clerking, Edwards sailed off to Australia, lived for a while on his brother’s farm near Melbourne, and then joined Melbourne’s new Theatre Royal, playing Petruchio in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and Iago in Othello.111 Gustavus Vaughan Brooke, the manager of the Theatre Royal and himself a celebrated British actor with whom Edwards had a complex relationship offstage, drank so heavily that he had to give up the management and also his wife, Polly, who divorced him. Edwards was the gainer, however, inheriting the management of the theater and Polly as well, marrying her soon after Brooke returned to England, debt-ridden and humiliated.112
When he could find time, Edwards pursued natural science and even sought permanent work as a curator at the new Sydney Museum of Natural History.113 A seventy-page letter of 1854 displayed his command to a naturalist friend, John Jones of Gloucester, England; in it, Edwards described the “Natural History” of Australia according to standard “classificatory groups,” from the “Marsupials” at the top to the “Diptera,” or flies, and other low-life at the bottom, and indicated along the way the life histories and Latin names of numerous species and their interrelationships, with special attention to predators. Edwards spent page after page on cuckoos, cockatoos, parrots, and parakeets, savoring their palette of colors, and concluding his account with the Blue Mountain parrot, a rainbow-colored bird “with the breast of bright orange, passing at the upper parts into scarlet, and at the lower part giving place to a deep blue, the wings green on the outer webs, the inner side black, with a band of sulphur yellow, the head is blue, with a dark streak down the centre of each feather.” He liked colorful beetles, too, finding many species among “the most strikingly beautiful” things in nature, “beautiful in the extreme.” Surprisingly, the lepidoptera (and of these, most were moths) got barely one page, out of the seventy, just beating out earthworms, cicadas, and walking sticks. “The Butterflies are particularly few,” he observed, “only nineteen being known to me, and the most common, is closely allied to [the European] Cynthia cardui.”114 But soon new vistas opened before Henry Edwards, revealing a startling abundance of butterflies spread throughout the entire Australian region, which he began to collect and exchange frantically in 1862, first at home and then elsewhere in the world, promising “300 to 400 specimens of the various orders” in exchange for “one half the same number of Lepidoptera of any country, my attention being now devoted particularly to that order.”115 Just as in the case of William Henry Edwards, the beauty of butterflies had trumped that of birds.
In 1866, Edwards emigrated, with his bugs and wife, to San Francisco, a city quite on the make, as Melbourne had been, with a lively theater culture. There he performed in, and helped manage, two companies, the Metropolitan and the California Theaters.116 He played Polonius in a cast with Edwin Booth and Lillie Langtry and worked the mining circuit, even into the Rockies, at a time when Americans from all walks of life enjoyed Shakespeare.117 He cofounded two centers for intellectual advancement, the Bohemian Club, where men and women met to hear “original contributions” in “music and literature,” and the California Academy of Sciences, where he became the curator of entomology, trustee, and vice president, in the company of other amateur butterfly men (above all the Germans Hans Hermann Behr, James Behrens, and Oscar Baron).118 Edwards disliked “dry classification” (although he did a lot of it) and admired the “seeing” sensibility or “that faculty of observation even of the meanest things.” Anything in nature caught his eye, but mostly the small things—the spiders, beetles, grasshoppers, scorpions, wasps, water bugs, bees, starfishes, and millipedes.119 But, above all, he was “omnivorous” about butterflies and moths, exotic as well as American, the food for his “dreaming and drifting temperament,” as one friend observed.120
In San Francisco, Edwards continued collecting and trading exotic butterflies, while joining Americans in their quest for native species, hunting nearly every day he could spare, first nearby, and later in the deserts and on mountaintops; he was proudest of catching a swallowtail (Papilio indra) and a satyrid (Chionobas ivallda) on a “very high peak” in the Sierras, the northernmost spot for these alpine-zone butterflies. Henry’s wife, Polly, also a lepidopterist, accompanied him on expeditions to the Sierras, discovering on her own at Summit Station two fully grown caterpillars of the brown elfin (Incisalia augustinus), a pretty little lycaenid with orange-brown underwings.121 Henry befriended John Muir, the Romantic wilderness man who had come to San Francisco at about the same time and took “a revolutionary moral position” toward nature: that human beings had no right to harm any part of creation for the sake of their own “happiness.”122 Edwards and Muir may have met at the California Academy but more likely in Yosemite, where Muir lived and worked. Muir called for an end to all hunting and hurting of nature, but when it came to butterflies and to Edwards, who shared with him similar Romantic feelings, he betrayed his convictions: “You are now in constant remembrance, because every flying flower is branded with your name.… I wish you
all the deep far-reaching joy you deserve in your dear sunful pursuits [sic].”123 Edwards named a butterfly after him, John Muir’s hairstreak (Callophyrs muiri), a dark russet little California species historically confined to “serpentine and gabbro soils where its hosts, MacNab and Sargent Cypresses, grow.”124 A patriot of a new place, he had begun to call the butterflies and moths of America “our fauna.”
Within two years of his emigration from Australia, Henry “pledged himself” to William Henry Edwards announcing that he would send to no one else all the unnamed species he found.125 His loyalty knew no bounds. “I will bow to no one else,” he wrote a friend. “He is our best authority on diurnals.”126 He sent William countless native American butterflies, along with many details of life histories that often resurfaced on the pages of both volumes of William Edwards’s The Butterflies of North America, perhaps the most significant record of Henry’s achievement.127 William put the actor’s photo in a “place of honor in my library,” and when a letter failed to come as expected, he was miserable: “I am thirsting for a letter from you like a parched soul in a desert.” After it arrived, William wrote that “your familiar hand gave me a sense of pleasure like that of sunshine on a bank of flowers.”128
The success William Henry Edwards had with volume 1 of The Butterflies of North America depended on the likes of Henry Edwards and Theodore Mead, just as it depended on his artists, on his natural science, and, not least, on the butterflies of West Virginia. Edwards’s first volume was one of the most rooted-in-place books ever published, saturated in “local coloring of West Virginia,” as Augustus Radcliffe Grote observed.129 And how gratifying it must have been for Edwards to behold the reaction of the naturalist press. On seeing the first plates in 1868, a leading London magazine warned the British to take heed, for “if illustrated works of so much beauty and accuracy as this can be produced on the other side of the Atlantic, it behooves Natural History Iconographers in our old Europe to look to their laurels.”130 There is “no one” in Britain “who can make such drawings with such fidelity to nature,” wrote Arthur Butler, the curator of butterflies at the British Museum, in a letter to Scudder.131 The natural science had the same effect, humbling even France’s Boisduval, who, indifferent to American pride, had described so many American species. Writing to Edwards, Boisduval compared him to the German naturalist Jacob Hübner, self-taught in butterflies, who designed cotton textiles for a living but was also the first great “world lepidopterist.” In the early 1800s, Hübner had invented a system of classification to accommodate, for the first time, all the known butterfly species since Linnaeus’s day; he named many genera of tropical butterflies that still stand today. Boisduval was willing to share his entire collection with Edwards. “I have nothing, absolutely nothing I wouldn’t let you have,” he wrote. “All my collection is at your disposal. I consider you the Hübner of North America.”132 Reporting on Edwards’s first installment, Charles Valentine Riley, the respected co-editor with Benjamin Walsh of the American Entomologist, observed, in 1868, that “if the future numbers shall bear the same marks of care, correctness, and artistic skill, as does this first number, we shall, without hesitation, declare it the finest work of its kind ever published in this or any other country.”133
If Edwards’s phobia for Calvinism helped drive him toward butterflies, Samuel Scudder’s affection for a milder version of it had a comparable effect on him. One of the finest all-around naturalists in America, Scudder was a Yankee, like Edwards, but a lifelong Protestant. He believed that the world had been called into being by a God power, as Jonathan Edwards had understood it, as an all-generative force of nature. This state of mind was strengthened by the naturalist Louis Agassiz, Scudder’s most significant teacher, who reviled Darwin for thinking that species evolved rather than having been formed, all at once, in a series of complete creations after every climatic catastrophe in the earth’s history, by a Higher Reality.134 Fervent Congregationalism, still bearing the Calvinist imprint, mixed with anti-Darwinism—no recipe could have irked Edwards more. Scudder showed symptoms of both.
Samuel Scudder. Courtesy of the Museum of Science, Boston.
Scudder was born in Boston on April 13, 1837, descended, on both sides of his family, from Puritan stock dating back to the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1620s. His father, Charles, a commission and hardware merchant of middling success and a Calvinist Congregationalist, ran a strict “Puritan home” and sent three of his five sons to Williams College to protect them from the “commercial life.”135 Scudder enrolled Samuel at Williams explicitly to place him under the influence of Mark Hopkins, president of the college, and the very same man who had scolded Edwards for studying on Sunday. According to Charles Scudder, Hopkins was a gifted Christian preacher (and more of a religious liberal, in his view, than a strict Calvinist) dedicated to teaching young men to marshal all their powers toward a noble end. “Man can have strength of character,” Hopkins said in a Boston sermon, “only as he is capable of controlling his faculties; of choosing a rational end; and in its pursuit, of holding fast to his integrity against all the might of external nature.”136
Samuel enrolled at Williams at sixteen, the same age as Edwards sixteen years earlier. If Edwards had hated the college on religious grounds, Scudder loved it on those same grounds. Both boys became collectors while at Williams. Unlike Edwards, Scudder did not begin with birds but went straight to butterflies, partly because Williams students collected them, whereas in Edwards’s day no one had. Early in his first year, Samuel noticed, in another student’s room, a “glazed box of butterflies, perhaps a dozen or twenty in number, artistically arranged and hung as a picture,” packed with specimens caught in Williamstown. “Got them right here,” the boy explained. “There are lots of them.” It was a revelation, a shaft of light. “I had not dreamed,” Scudder recalled in 1896, “that such beautiful objects existed, least of all at home, or that so many kinds could be found in one spot.”137
Scudder began to hunt for butterflies around Williamstown, a landscape in the Berkshire hills rendered passable by farmers. He entered a deep ravine, shut in on both sides by steep mountain slopes, warm in summer and thick with butterflies, where he captured his “first love,” the “banded purple,” a “showy insect,” he observed, with “a broad white bow stretched across rich purplish black wings.” He also caught a rare early hairstreak there (Erora laeta), a small insect with turquoise hind wings speckled in red, its family name derived, Scudder wrote, from the fine “delicate markings threading the under surface of the wings” in the manner of all such butterflies. It landed “at my very feet,” and, in an instant, “my net was over it” and “I triumphantly” blurted out a line from a Shakespeare sonnet: “How have, I say, mine eyes been blessed made/By looking on thee in the living day” (Scudder wrote “have” in place of Shakespeare’s “would”).138
Also responsible for Scudder’s enthusiasm for butterflies was Paul Chadbourne, an all-around naturalist with an entomological bent, who taught natural history at Williams and attracted a small student coterie to study insects with him.139 Under Chadbourne’s wing, Scudder became—like Edwards—a naturalist, but with a difference, since he apparently also studied natural religion with Chadbourne. Chadbourne, no reactionary in science, welcomed all advances in “the means of observing,” or in what he called “Humboldt’s power of seeing.”140 “In one year a man may see more of the earth than Humboldt could see in ten,” he noted, yet he insisted that “man stands alone,” above all other animals in his “belief in God, in immortality, in accountability, and in having the instinctive impulses of prayer and praise towards an unseen Being.” An “Unseen Power,” he maintained, circulated through the “structures of the earth,” which humans experience when they study nature. He was not a strict Calvinist like Jonathan Edwards, but his views were in the Edwardsian spirit, muffled perhaps on the theological level but full-blown in terms of the natural world. Chadbourne’s double vision helped convert Scud
der into something of an entomological zealot.141 A beneficiary (if that is the right word), like William Henry Edwards, of the waning of religious orthodoxy and the rise of secular natural history, which exposed many eyes to the beauty of the world in a way Jonathan Edwards could not have known, Scudder was freed to study butterflies at the cost of studying God.