William Holland's The Butterfly Book: Comparing Their General Characteristics

William J. Holland’s 1898 and 1930 editions of his epic tome, The Butterfly Book, describes and depicts in seventy-seven full color Plates and numerous figures the more than seven hundred valid species and the several hundred varieties then known in North America north of the Rio Grande of Texas. In the writing, Holland (1848-1932) had access to all of the then known American literature referring to most of the species occurring north and south of the equator. The earliest descriptions by other Lepidopterists of North American butterflies are found in writings now virtually unknown and largely unavailable except in the rarest of copies. The very first illustration, a painting of an American butterfly, was that of a Tiger Swallowtail by
Thaddeus William Harris published a report on the insects of the State of Massachusetts injurious to vegetation though of the more than 2,000 insects reported, only a relatively few of the New England butterflies named were such as some swallowtail, white and sulphur species which also occur in Texas. In 1852, Englishman Edward Doubleday, a Quaker much enamored of butterflies, traveled extensively in the United States to compare similarities of American and English species and wrote The Genera of Diurnal Lepidoptera: Comparing their General Characteristics. He was so struck with the flora, butterflies and landscapes in the United States “the richest and most verdant pastures” he had ever seen, that he thought of moving to Kentucky, but didn’t. From the times of the more recent publications on North American butterflies, the 1878 Strecker Butterfly book, and that of the 1898 Holland book, used the binomial nomenclature system devised by Carl Linnaeus in 1735 that classified all living things down basically to genera and species. But ever since, and it always will be, that taxonomic “splitters” and “lumpers” will continue to change Latin names back and forth, and while logically in most cases name changes are based upon sound morphological studies and comparisons of species, all too often name changes seem little more than whimsical “nuttiness” and matters of one’s own personal
However, of the more than one hundred worldwide Graphium species known, Howe lists Graphium marcellus (Cramer) as being the only Zebra Swallowtail found in North America and specifically north of Mexico through eastern Texas and east to the Atlantic Coast. Glassberg, Carter, Brook, and Neck (see References) classify the Zebra Swallowtail as Eurytides marcellus. Clarence M. Weed named the Zebra Swallowtail Iphiclides ajax marcellus, and so it goes. William J. Holland followed Linnaeus with Papilio ajax, though he named marcellus as a variety after William Henry Edwards, and who wrote in his book: “There is a great deal of dispute about the names of the Ajax group by the different forms of this beautiful insect.” The “forms” are only seasonal variations in appearance of the early and late spring and summer broods but still of the same