In recounting the inspiration derived from the books in his childhood home, Vladimir Nabokov described The Butterflies of the Eastern United States and Canada by Samuel Hubbard Scudder (1837-1911) with a powerful word: “stupendous.” As a consummate writer, Nabokov is unlikely to have used that adjective lightly. It reveals a great deal not only about Nabokov's impression of the quality of Scudder's three-volume 1889 treatise, but also about the multifaceted connections that exist between this American scientist and the writer's own devotion to the close study of butterfly science.

An American lepidopterist

Born into a Boston hardware merchant family, Samuel Scudder developed a passion for collecting and studying butterflies as a student at Williams College in western Massachusetts. After graduation he went on to study with geologist and zoologist Louis Agassiz, working for a number of years as his assistant at Harvard's famed Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ)—which Agassiz had founded—where Scudder helped start the Museum's extensive entomology collection. Subsequent work with Thaddeus Harris and William Henry Edwards, both pioneers in the young field of lepidoptery as it was developing in North America, moved Scudder to focus his professional interests intensively on the study of butterflies. Together with his contemporary entomologists, Scudder devoted himself to work—research, writing and lecturing—that would ultimately successfully challenge a Eurocentric understanding of North America's butterfly populations held by many of their influential counterparts across the Atlantic. Through their efforts, Scudder and his American lepidopterist colleagues established that many, if not most, butterflies of North America should be understood as distinct species and not, as had until then been frequently assumed, simply as variants of those found in Europe.

Delving deeply into this collection, Nabokov found one of Scudder's butterflies, labeled Rusticus scudderii was actually a member of a different genus. Accordingly, Nabokov reclassified the butterfly under a new name, Lycaeides melissa samuelis in 1943, showing his respect for Scudder not only by retaining his (first) name in the classification, but also by using one of Scudder’s hand-raised specimens, from eggs collected in Karner, New York, as the holotype for the species. While "Karner Blue" eventually became the common name by which this butterfly is known, the scientific name has since changed. Now called Plebejus samuelis it has been proven to be its own species, not a subspecies. More information about the Karner Blue can be found under the "From Nabokov's Net" section this exhibit.

Nabokov’s work as a butterfly scientist is strongly connected to the Karner Blue, so it is interesting to note that he likely had first seen this small blue butterfly as a young boy perusing the cherished copy Scudder’s Butterflies of the Eastern United States and Canada in his family's library. On Plate 6 of this volume, Rusticus scudderii is shown in illustrations 6 and 7.

Butterflies of the Eastern United States and Canada is considered a masterpiece in North American lepidoptery. The work can rightfully be described as a 19th century example of effective crowd-sourcing from the wider citizen science community. As he set out to gather the content needed for his largely self-funded, decades-long project, Scudder leveraged his connections in the natural history world to put the word out to amateur naturalists throughout the region: send the results of any distinctive butterfly catching or rearing endeavor his way, and if the submission proved suitable for inclusion in the publication he was preparing, attribution was guaranteed. The call resulted in a flood of responses and made for an inventory covering the physiology, life history, distribution, and classification of the butterflies of the American Northeast so comprehensive that it continues to be an influential guide to this day.

Under a microscope’s lens

More than any other lepidopterist of his time, Scudder was known for devoting himself to exacting examination of butterfly morphology using a microscope—with a magnifying power of 25x, his scope was considered state of the art—often with particular focus on butterfly genitalia. The insights of these investigations can be seen in the finely detailed images of the wings, scales, and other anatomical features of butterflies featured in The Butterflies, setting this work apart from most other butterfly studies of the era. It's easy to believe that these images, many beautifully rendered in fine black and white engravings, provided considerable inspiration to young Nabokov and set the stage for the countless hours he himself would spend peering through the lens of a microscope in the course of his adult life as a lepidopterist.