Chasing Butterflies for Money
By J. McDunnough
MORE or less periodically a lurid account crops out in the newspapers to the effect that some millionaire, usually a member of the Rothschild family, has paid a fabulous sum for a butterfly — a sum ranging anywhere, according to the vividness of the reporter’s imagination, from five hundred dollars to ten thousand dollars. The effect on the average reader is either to cause a sneer of pity that anyone, even a millionaire, can be such a fool as to part with so much money for so frail and useless an object or else to create the impression that it is simply necessary to go out on the front porch or into the back yard with a hat or broom or makeshift net, knock down some unwary member of the butterfly family which happens to stray within reach, impale it on a pin in a cardboard box and ship it post haste to the aforesaid millionaire in order to receive by return mail a substantial check.
These newspaper tales seem to have a common origin in the fact that some twenty or thirty years ago an expedition to one of the islands of the Malay Archipelago was financed by a member of the Rothschild family. One of the prime objects of this expedition was to secure specimens of a large butterfly of a pure black color of which only a single specimen was known at the time. In this the collectors were perfectly successful. Besides securing specimens of the species in question, -however, the expedition brought back a vast quantity of other material of great scientific value. The total expenses were doubtless considerable, probably well above ten thousand dollars; but it was not correct to assert, as it was asserted at the time, that this sum had been expended for a single butterfly. It was not spent even for specimens of a single species of butterfly. The variety of butterflies is not as a rule due to the fact that there is actually a great scarcity of certain species in Nature, but rather because these species frequent inaccessible regions or countries. Those brilliant metallic blue butterflies of South America, the giant Morphos, generally fly in the tree tops of almost impenetrable jungles, making their capture on the wing very difficult and almost impossible ; today, however, collectors armed with field-glasses search certain trees for the caterpillars which can often be secured in good numbers without any more difficulty, after they are once located, than that of climbing the tree and cutting oft" the twig on which the caterpillar rests. By confining these larvae in jars or cages with a sufficient supply of the food plant they undergo their transformation just as well as or even better than in a natural state. In due course of time the butterfly emerges and is thus secured in much more perfect condition than if it had been caught on the wing. As a consequence of the increased supply the price of
these species has dropped tremendously during
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