CHAPTER I
BOOKS ABOUT BUTTERFLIES
Many ancient and mediaeval writers dealt with butterflies, but the first descriptions of American species are found in the works of Linnaeus, the great Swedish naturalist who wrote about 1750, and invented the system upon which all modern classification is based. Pictures of several American butterflies were published in 1759 by Charles Clerck, who had studied with Linnaeus.
Johann Christian Fabricius, a professor at the University of Kiel, published a few more descriptions in 1796, and Peter Cramer, at about the same time, brought out four large volumes on the butterflies of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Most of these early books were written in Latin, and are now so rare and expensive that few American students have ever seen them.
Jacob Hübner published his great volumes on exotic butterflies in the early part of the nineteenth century. This work was written in German, and contained more than six hundred colored plates, but a good copy now costs about eight hundred dollars, and is of very little use anyway.
In 1797 Sir James Edward Smith brought out his two-volume work on The Natural History of the Rarer Lepiodopterous Insects of Georgia, the first books ever devoted exclusively to North American species. This work is valuable chiefly because it contains some drawings by John Abbot, an Englishman who had actually lived in Georgia and studied moths and butterflies at first hand. Some of Abbot’s pictures were later used in another work on American lepidoptera by Dr. J. A. Boisduval of Paris, and Major J. L. LeConte of New York, who wrote in French about 1833. The books of both Smith and Boisduval are now practically unobtainable.
In 1841 the Biological Survey Commission of Massachusetts published a report on injurious insects by Dr. Thaddeus William Harris, which described many New England butterflies. It is now out of print, the last edition appearing in 1862.
The Rev. John G. Harris brought together a deal of information from the works of other writers, and made a few minor observations of his own; his compilation was published by the Smithsonian Institution about 1860.
In 1868 William H. Edwards, an engineer who lived in Coalburg, West Virginia, brought out the first volume of his famous work, The Butterflies of North America—probably the best book on the subject ever written. Edwards laboriously worked out the life-histories of many species, and illustrated the work by careful drawings and paintings of his own. Two more volumes appeared later, the last one published in 1897. The Butterflies of North America is a magnificent piece of work, produced under all sorts of handicaps, and will always be a classic to American students of the subject.
In 1886 Dr. Samuel Hubbard Scudder published his Butterflies of New England in three volumes; this monograph is superbly illustrated, and compares very favorably even with the epoch-making work of Edwards. The works of Edwards and Scudder are probably the best books on butterflies ever written in any language, and must always remain as monuments of American industry and scholarship. Because of the excessive cost of reproducing the colored plates, however, they are both rather expensive; Scudder’s work retailed at ninety dollars, while Edward’s three volumes never sold for less than a hundred and fifty, and even this price, according to Dr. W. J. Holland, was below the cost of manufacture.
The Butterflies of the Eastern United States, by G. H. French, appeared about 1886. It is a good little book, and is still in common use, but the illustrations are few and unsatisfactory.
In 1891 C. J. Maynard published a Manual of North American Butterflies with ten colored plates; the plates are very poor indeed, and the text not much better.
In 1893 Dr. Samuel Hubbard Scudder, the author of the three great volumes on the New England species, brought out a little book called The Life of a Butterfly. It is a brief and popular account of the life-history of Anosia plexippus, the Monarch or Milkweed butterfly, which is common everywhere. Dr. Scudder’s Brief Guide to the Commoner Butterflies of the Northern United States and Canada also appeared in 1893—a very useful little book.
In 1898 Dr. W. J. Holland, Director of the Carnegie Museum at Pittsburgh, published his famous Butterfly Book, in which he described more than five hundred species, accompanying each description with a sketch of the life-history and habits in all cases where these details were known. The magnificent colored photograph plates are quite equal for all practical purposes to the hand-colored drawings of Edwards and Scudder, and enable the veriest tyro to classify any of the commoner butterflies simply by comparing them with the pictures. Besides the detailed description of each species there is a great deal of miscellaneous information of interest to the general reader. Because of the new process of reproducing photographs in colors the book sold very cheaply—never more than four or five dollars—and has done more to arouse a popular interest in butterflies than all other works together. Many of the elementary books since 1898 are indebted to Holland’s book, and the present booklet is no exception.
In 1905 William Greenwood Wright of San Francisco, published a book called West Coast Butterflies. This work is illustrated with colored plates nearly as good as Holland’s, and is indispensable to those interested in California species.
George B. Longstaff’s Butterfly-Hunting in Many Lands appeared in 1912. The book itself is of no great interest to North Americans, as Longstaff spent only two weeks here, and came no farther south than Montreal. Still, his chapter of Bionomic Notes deals with butterflies in general and is well worth reading. The best part of the book, however, is the appendix, which contains E. A. Elliott’s translations of Fritz Müller’s famous papers on scent-producing organs in butterflies. The most important of these had never been published except in some obscure Portuguese journals, practically inaccessible to the American student.
In 1916, encouraged by the success of his Butterfly Book, Dr. Holland prepared a pocket manual called the Butterfly Guide, with colored figures representing some two hundred and fifty species.
In 1917 there appeared Clarence M. Weed’s Butterflies Worth Knowing, with thirty-two plates in color. This is one of the best of the smaller popular books, and contains a great deal of valuable modern material, but is not to be compared with Holland’s work.
No important popular books on butterflies have appeared in recent years. The best single work for the general reader is still Holland’s Butterfly Book; those living west of the Rockies should have Wright’s West Coast Butterflies also.