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Butterfly People: An American Encounter with the Beauty of the World, by William R. Leach
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With 32 pages of full-color inserts and black-and-white illustrations throughout.
From one of our most highly regarded historians, here is an original and engrossing chronicle of nineteenth-century America’s infatuation with butterflies, and the story of the naturalists who unveiled the mysteries of their existence.
A product of William Leach’s lifelong love of butterflies, this engaging and elegantly illustrated history shows how Americans from all walks of life passionately pursued butterflies, and how through their discoveries and observations they transformed the character of natural history. Leach focuses on the correspondence and scientific writings of half a dozen pioneering lepidopterists who traveled across the country and throughout the world, collecting and studying unknown and exotic species. In a book as full of life as the subjects themselves and foregrounding a collecting culture now on the brink of vanishing, Leach reveals how the beauty of butterflies led Americans into a deeper understanding of the natural world. He shows, too, that the country’s enthusiasm for butterflies occurred at the very moment that another form of beauty—the technological and industrial objects being displayed at world’s fairs and commercial shows—was emerging, and that Americans’ attraction to this new beauty would eventually, and at great cost, take precedence over nature in general and butterflies in particular.
- Sales Rank: #1280833 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-04-09
- Released on: 2013-04-09
- Format: Kindle eBook
Amazon.com Review
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Guest Review by Robert Michael Pyle
Robert Michael Pyle is the author of The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies .
Butterfly People is the most exciting butterfly book I have read in years: open it anywhere, and the pages spread to reveal stories, spangles, and mysteries as beguiling as any butterfly's pattern. Bill Leach takes us on an extraordinary flight among the collectors, scientist- artists, and other pioneers of butterflies who gave us their names, first studied their lifeways, and otherwise brought them to public attention in America and abroad. Everyone who suffers from an unquenchable love of Lepidoptera will find deep delight and endless fascination in Bill Leach's masterful history of this universal human passion for the most beautiful of insects. Dead and dry in books, the names of people intimately associated with our beloved butterflies—Edwards, Scudder, Strecker, Holland, many more— live and breathe in these enchanted pages. After fifty years of butterfly study, I feel as if I finally know the great and very human lepidopterists I have idolized since boyhood. Nor are they lives of monotonous ecstasy in the Elysian fields—ecstasy there is in plenty, but it is set among scenes of salty struggle, venal ego, mortal drama, and heroic striving that, taken altogether, made for the greatest century of butterfly art and understanding ever achieved. I know no better window into the exciting era of Darwinian encounter with novel life forms than this--to be sure, a thrilling read for all contemporary Butterfly People.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Historian Leach (Country of Exiles, 1999) was wild for butterflies as a boy, and he now turns his exuberant joy in their winged beauty into a unique celebration of nineteenth-century American butterfly fanatics. Naturalism was all the rage, fueled by Darwin’s discoveries, and butterfly people collected, bred, and studied vast numbers of the resplendent butterfly species that then flourished on the land’s “agrarian tapestry.” With scintillating precision and original, paradigm-shifting interpretation, Leach tells the intriguing, delvingly researched life stories of such lepidopterological trailblazers as William Henry Edwards, a coal-mine manager who wrote the landmark, three-volume Butterflies of North America, and stone carver Herman Strecker, whose father tried to beat his youthful obsession with butterflies out of him but who persisted and amassed America’s largest butterfly collection, now housed at the Field Museum in Chicago. Leach astutely considers how pursuing butterflies “placed people inside the fullness of nature,” engendering crucial ecological understanding, even as escalating industrialization caused environmental destruction. Replete with forays into the creation of butterfly guidebooks and art, the mania for exotic specimens, and a history of the butterfly net, Leach’s astute and exciting inquiry into a time of heightened awareness of “the beauty of the world, in both its natural and its artificial forms,” delivers new understanding of our past and present. --Donna Seaman
From Bookforum
The particular rapture of butterfly collection and study, the sensuous delight of this most painterly branch of entomology, was commonly voiced by its nineteenth century adherents, as historian William Leach notes in his new book,Butterfly People. The vivid, intimate connection with nature that the butterfly people cultivated and celebrated in the course of their scientific study is now almost forgotten—and along with its extinction, we have not merely lost the habitats and species detailed with such care a hundred years ago, but also some essential part of humanity. Leach's book is a brilliant work of history, but it's also a compelling lament for a lost way of existing in the world.—Britt Peterson
Most helpful customer reviews
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
An Historic Examination of Lepidoptery in America
By David B Richman
While browsing in a bookstore in Edmonds, Washington, I came across this very specialized history of butterfly and moth study in the United States during the Nineteenth Century. Certainly in "Butterfly People: An American Encounter with the Beauty of the World" William Leach has created a most attractive tome. The book is worth the cost just for the beautiful reproductions of Nineteenth Century plates of butterflies and moths. However the casual reader might be tempted to think that this is a book full of dull facts about a very narrow field in a rather uninteresting historical period. In this they would be in error, as the study of the Lepidoptera gave exciting insights into evolution, genetics (eventually), distribution and ecology, as well as behavior. Not only that, but the lives of the lepidopterists makes fascinating reading. Most of the people involved, such as William Henry Edwards, Theodore Mead, Henry Edwards, Samuel Scudder, Augustus Grote, Holland, and others, led lives that were not isolated from the events of the day and in very human fashion they had their disagreements, which could become quite bitter. Leach has well captured the excitement of natural history as practiced by the best in the field, some of whom studied not only the adults, but the immature stages, from egg to pupa, as well. These were for the most part experts in their areas and they contributed to numerous areas of biology, not just limited to butterflies and moths. Among other contributions they were early pioneers in the study of the entire life cycles of their organisms, and these researches led to a much deeper understanding of the butterfly and moth fauna than just collecting (although important in its own right) did.
I have two, very minor quibbles. On pp. 121-122 Leach consistently misspells Theodore Dru Allison Cockerell's name as "Cocherell." As Cockerell was a biology professor here in the 1890s at the then New Mexico College of Agricultural and Mechanical Arts (Now New Mexico State University) I am well acquainted with him. Also on p. 162 the author states "The most notorious parasitoids belong to the Ichneumonidae, a populous family of flies and wasps that encompass the genus Ichneumon." In fact the Ichneumonidae are ALL parasitoid wasps (none are flies) and there are numerous genera and species, only a relatively few species of which are in the genus Ichneumon (about 140 in the Nearctic.) However I have so far not found any other such typos that I could discern.
I would advise the reader who has any interest in the history of science in the United States, or who is interested in butterflies and moths or the art of producing color plates of these beautiful insects (usually prepared by women), to get a copy of this book and read it in its entirety. It would be well worth it.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
The Elusive Butterfly of...love?
By Art Shapiro
Technically it may be an ethical violation for me to review this book, since I was consulted regularly by the author, read the MS and offered detailed feedback, and blurbed it on the jacket. So naturally I think it's wonderful. Objectively, it is. But to pique the interest of potential readers, I will mention something that isn't obvious: the great butterfly workers of the 19th and early 20th centuries may have been splendid scientists, but they were often prickly and difficult people. There's more fussin', fightin' and feudin' in here than in a history of the moonshining industry. And it's fascinating stuff that sheds light on how science actually gets done and evolves over time...which one would expect, given that the author is a distinguished historian, not a pulp writer. As they say, it's a great read. Check it out.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Grab Your Net and Become Entranced
By Rob Hardy
Who is not cheered by the sight of a butterfly? Other insects pain, impoverish, or sicken us, but butterflies are "flying flowers" or "winged jewels," or at least those are a couple of the ways eighteenth-century butterfly enthusiasts referred to them. Alfred Russel Wallace was the co-discoverer of evolution, and he appreciated butterflies as examples of descent with modification, but he also said that the use of the butterfly's colorful wings was "to add the final touches to a world-picture, calculated at once to please and refine mankind." Indeed, he found collecting one specimen so thrilling that he wrote, "On taking it out of my net and opening the glorious wings my heart began to beat violently, the blood rushed to my head, and I felt more like fainting than I have done when in apprehension of death. I had a headache the rest of the day." That's the sort of passion that inspired many others, and in _Butterfly People: An American Encounter with the Beauty of the World_ (Pantheon), historian William Leach tells how Americans were afflicted with the butterfly madness during the nineteenth century. Leach is a butterfly enthusiast, and that is one reason he wrote the book. If you don't share that passion, don't worry; there are enough odd characters and backbiting here to keep things interesting, plus plenty of insights into insect science, ecology, and the mindset of American entrepreneurs of the time.
Though many families had butterfly nets, Leach of course concentrates on those collectors who made the biggest of collections, or had the biggest business in selling or trading specimens, or did scientific research or published guides to butterfly identification. One was Herman Strecker, a memorial stone carver with a collection of 200,000 specimens. Another was William Henry Edwards, who operated coal mines but also raised butterflies in his house. There was Harvard-trained entomologist Samuel Scudder who named the monarch butterfly. Augustus Grote, who besides expertise in butterflies and especially moths was a self-taught composer and a historian of religions. The butterfly people may have been inspired by the highest ideals of nature and beauty with their study of these gentle creatures, but they often descended into cranky complaints about each other, even to character assassination. Even readers who aren't especially interested in butterflies will find amusing the teapot tempests which engrossed these lepidopterological giants. Some of the conflict was scientific. As was the pattern for natural history at the time, enthusiasts might have started their collections as a way of praising the complex works of God, but then wound up finding more and more evidence that species were the product of evolution. Edwards was, for instance, a staunch advocate of evolution, which he thought accounted for his observations in his butterfly-raising experiments. Scudder started out believing that every species was created immutably by God, and only after many years of argument came around to the scientific view. That isn't to say that the two agreed; they had huge arguments over taxonomy. When Scudder proposed a new scheme of classifying species, Edwards called it one that "only Alice in Wonderland would understand," and asserted it was his mission to keep everyone from its "bogs and pitfalls." There were inevitable arguments about credit for discovering species, or payments for specimens. Grote accused Strecker of stealing specimens from the Museum of Central Park, and continued the accusations for decades. He called Strecker "that entomological spider!" Grote and Edwards disagreed on much, but Edwards joined in the calumny, calling Strecker "an illiterate, uneducated man who could not possibly identify all the insects he collects. He is a maniac." The antagonists enjoyed calling each other in print fools, liars, clowns, and (unkindest cut) "a classificator without ideas." Even Edwards wondered, "What is there about our science that makes one type of men so inflammable, and another rascals and thieves?"
The arguments presented afresh here are long over, and alas, so is the degree of passion for the lovely insects. Part of the change came from changes in ecology; you can read here about collectors eager to net specimens from the woods and fields of Brooklyn or Staten Island. The railroads that had made it easier for collectors to get into the pristine landscape also degraded the habitat of the butterflies, as did the rise of the suburbs, the decline of family farms, and the boom in industrial logging. Pinned specimens became less important when researchers could easily review inexpensive and accurate color images. The butterfly people were on an aesthetic quest, valuing the ineffable beauty of their specimens, as well as a scientific quest for hard data and microscopic examinations. Beauty merged with science for them, but lepidopterology is now firmly in the scientific realm. Leach has given a thoughtful review of a way of thinking about nature that is no more, in a book with splendid reproductions of butterfly pictures out of the volumes the butterfly people produced. The book is an extended look at a tiny realm of American entomological history, but with insightful views of larger historical, scientific, and ecological issues.
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