Life Among the Butterflies

Vance Randolph

9781465668325

213 pages

Library of Alexandria

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Overview

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.