The Aurelian Legacy: British Butterflies and their Collectors

Although it has pained some professionals to admit it, gifted amateurs have done much to advance the cause of science. Perhaps nowhere is this more true, English physician Michael Salmon writes, than in the field of lepidopterology.

The figure of the eccentric butterfly collector is a staple of British comedy, and indeed, as Salmon shows, many early collectors offered easy targets as the very definition of eccentricity. Over the years, more and more ordinary men and women came to share their passion for nature study, so that, by Victorian times, households throughout Britain "boasted a cabinet of shells, butterflies, or fossils, together with a series of George Routledge's shilling volumes on natural history, or a book of newspaper cuttings from the weekly 'nature' column." By the late 19th century, the fields and woods were crowded with collectors, so many that the numbers of butterfly species like the Large Blue, Black-veined White, and Large Tortoiseshell were considerably thinned. (They and many other species are now extinct or nearly so, Salmon writes, though not through the fault of collectors.) Some collectors were indeed mere hobbyists, but field notes and reports by amateurs formed an essential record for more formal scientific descriptions of range, behavior, and other aspects of lepidopteran natural history.

In a series of essays, Salmon offers a history of butterfly collecting in Britain, describes some 35 species of particular historical or biological interest (including the wayward North American monarch and the remarkable Camberwell Beauty, "the Holy Grail of British butterfly collectors"), and profiles more than a hundred prominent "Aurelians," or butterfly collectors, from 1550 to the present. His handsomely illustrated book, brimming with lore and trivia on such matters as the first recorded use of the butterfly net and the origin of butterfly names in English, makes lively reading--and an ideal gift--for Aurelians today. --Gregory McNamee