Since its serial publication in The Entomologist\u27s Record during 1895, Augustus Radcliffe Grote\u27s  Collecting Noctuidae by Lake Erie  has become a minor classic of entomological literature. This brief but compelling reminiscence of two and a half months under canvas has long been considered one of the finest of the many accounts which have been written about the pursuit of Lepidoptera, and it is especially treasured by those collectors who, like Grote at Lake Erie, have used the method of \u27sugaring\u27 to capture moths. Surely much of the essay\u27s appeal is due to Grote\u27s facile and unusually colorful literary style; as P. B. M. Allan (1948) has observed,  it is given to but few of us to paint like that

Wilkinson, Ronald S.

English

ValpoScholar

The Great Lakes Entomologist 
Volume 7 
Number 1 -- Spring 1974 Number 1 -- Spring 
1974 
Article 4 
March 1974 
The Genesis of A.R. Grote's "Collecting Noctuidae by Lake Erie" 
Ronald S. Wilkinson 
The Library of Congress 
Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.valpo.edu/tgle 
 Part of the Entomology Commons 
Recommended Citation 
Wilkinson, Ronald S. 1974. "The Genesis of A.R. Grote's "Collecting Noctuidae by Lake Erie"," The Great 
Lakes Entomologist, vol 7 (1) 
Available at: https://scholar.valpo.edu/tgle/vol7/iss1/4 
This Peer-Review Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Biology at ValpoScholar. 
It has been accepted for inclusion in The Great Lakes Entomologist by an authorized administrator of ValpoScholar. 
For more information, please contact a ValpoScholar staff member at scholar@valpo.edu. 
THE GREAT LAKES ENTOMOLOGIST Vol. 7,  No. 1 
THE GENESIS OF  A.  R. GROTE'S 
"COLLECTING NOCTUIDAE BY LAKE ERIE" 
Ronald S. Wilkinson 
The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 
Since its serial publication in The Entomologist's Record during 1895, Augustus 
Radcliffe Grote's "Collecting Noctuidae by Lake Erie" has become a minor classic of 
entomological literature. This brief but  compelling reminiscence of two and a half 
months under canvas has long been considered one of the finest of the many accounts 
which have been written about the pursuit of Lepidoptera, and it is especially treasured 
by those collectors who, like Grote at  Lake Erie, have used the method of 'sugaring' to 
capture moths. Surely much of the essay's appeal is due to Grote's facile and unusually 
colorful literary style; as P. B. M. Allan (1948) has observed, "it is given to but  few of us 
to paint like that." 
Although Grote's account was not  published until 1895, his spring sojourn near Lake 
Erie dated from almost two decades earlier. He did not  mention the year in his essay, but  
evidence in several of his other papers indicates that it was 1877. Grote was then director 
of the museum of the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences (Wilkinson, 1971), and in his 
spare time was collecting widely in the Buffalo area to add to  the museum's holdings and 
augment his own collection of Lepidoptera, then on deposit at the Society. The local list 
of his friend E. P. Van Duzee (1891) gives some idea of the scope of Grote's efforts near 
Buffalo, although the Grote collection had gone to the British Museum long before Van 
Duzee's paper, and its data were not  available to him. 
Toward the end of April, 1877, Grote made his way from Buffalo southwest through 
Erie County to Evans Township, where upon "the inner of the two over-lapping, high 
and wooded, sandy ridges which run parallel with the south shore of Lake Erie," he 
pitched his tent "before the new green had fully clothed the trees" (Grote, 1895). 
Although Grote did not indicate the exact locality of his camp, references to  the nearby 
town of Angola and the presence of a creek enable identification of the approximate area 
on a map (Fig. 1). We may suppose from the evidence he gives that his routine was fairly 
regular; each evening he chose a succession of trees and 'sugared' them with a mixture of 
beer and molasses, afterwards making his rounds with a bull's-eye lantern, net and 
wide-mouthed collecting bottles with corks, periodically emptying his captures into a 
larger cyanide-charged store jar and, after the late nineteenth-century fashion, fully 
mounting his moths in camp the next day. 
The bare scientific chronology of his activities gives little indication of the flavor of 
the essay which he eventually wrote. Grote's first captures were from such early genera as 
Lithophane and Eupsilia, and on the first of May he took his first Habrosyne scripta 
(Gosse) (Thyatiridae), "a tiny three-cornered bit of fluffy pinkness"; it was followed by 
another Thyatirid, Pseudothyatira cjwzatophoroides (Guende), of which he captured a 
good series. As the early spring Noctuids gave way to those of May, Apatela, Agrotis, 
Mamestra, Xylena and other genera appeared, and he became much more particular as his 
spreading-boards filled. On June 8 Grote, who could not long withhold information from 
his favorite journals, sent a brief communication from his lakeshore locality to The 
Canadian Entornologist, announcing that "Entomology can be pursued with great success 
when camping out," and listing fifteen species of Lepidoptera which he had recently 
taken at  bait, including four Sphingids. Grote was especially charmed by Darapsa 
versicolor (Harris), of which he took one and saw another, quoting Marcus Aurelius to 
characterize the moth: "that which is beautiful is beautiful in itself; the praise of man 
adds nothing to it" (Grote, 1877a). 
In June Septis ligrlicolora (Guende) and S. arctica (Boisduval) were especially 
common, the latter becoming "a decided nuisance" (Grote, 1895), and they were soon 
joined by a number of Deltoids, which especially interested Grote. Of these he took a 
Zarzclognatha which at  first appeared to be a new species, but  he later decided it to be an 
extraordinary variety of his own laevigata. Like many American collectors after him, 
1
Wilkinson: The Genesis of A.R. Grote's "Collecting Noctuidae by Lake Erie"
Published by ValpoScholar, 1974
1974 THE GREAT LAKES ENTOMOLOGIST 17  
Fig. 1. The approximate location of A. R .  Grote's 1877 camp near Lake Erie. From a 
nineteenth-century map of the Buffalo, N.Y. region, in the collections of the  Library 
of Congress. 
Grote was amused by the antics of flying squirrels at his bait, and he captured several 
with his net and kept them in a box-cage for several days. The genus Catocala, an old 
favorite of Grote's, began to appear in late June, and in July the underwings "swarmed 
like bats" about his camp. Beginning with clintoni Grote, he took eighteen species of 
Catocala in his restricted locality, over half the number reported by Van Duzee (1891) 
for the greater Buffalo region. 
As a happy finale t o  his expedition, Grote captured at the light of his tent some 
Noetuids, thcn rare in collections, which did not  come to his bait; he considered the best 
to be Panthra acronyctoides (Walker), Ortcocnernis riparia Morrison and Plusia 
thyatyroides Guende. In mid-July he had to return to Buffalo with his specimens and 
notes, and the first of a half-dozen of his captures to be described as new species was 
2
The Great Lakes Entomologist, Vol. 7, No. 1 [1974], Art. 4
https://scholar.valpo.edu/tgle/vol7/iss1/4
18 THE GREAT LAKES ENTOMOLOGIST Vol. 7, No. 1 
reported to  The Canadian Entomologist in October; it was Pallachira (now Hormisa) 
bivittata (Grote, 1877b). In the same month he revisited the site near Angola, and later 
described the scene in a passage which well illustrates the style of "Collecting Noctuidae 
by Lake Erie": "It was a lovely late October day, the leaves all ripely floating to the 
ground amid a stillness broken only by the noise of dropping chestnut burrs. The air 
itself was saturated with hazy light, the memory of summer days. Some autumn Spanner 
moths were lazily fluttering about, coloured like the yellow leaves. . . ." (Grote, 1895). 
The vivid language of "Collecting Noctuidae by Lake Erie" might suggest that Grote's 
essay was written soon after the event, but this was not the case, for in it he quoted 
passages from an unidentified work, the "latest. . .on the British Musuem 'types'," in 
reality John B. Smith's Catalogue. . .of the. . .lepidopterous superfamily Noctuidae, found 
in boreal America (Washington, 1893), continuing his protracted disagreement with Smith 
over Francis Walker's types and his own names. He attacked the new catalogue for "the 
animus which has guided the whole enquiry, and which has resulted in cutting down the 
nearly 800 species of North American Noctuidae, originally described by me, to about 
650." Grote, who had left the United States in 1884, was residing in Bremen, Germany 
when Smith's catalogue was published (Wilkinson, 1971), and he first referred to  it in 
print in his "Notes on nocturnal Lepidoptera," in the March, 1894 Canadian Ento- 
mologist. Grote's censure of Smith in "Collecting Noctuidae by Lake Erie" indicates that 
the essay was written in 1894 or early 1895. 
Grote's mood during his German years often turned to reverie, and at times he 
recalled his happier American experiences as would a man in exile; the word itself even 
appeared in his publications (e.g. Grote, 18861, although the decision to emigrate was his 
own. As early as 1886 he had recalled his old camp, and written that '%y the Lake at 
Buffalo, Time, winged with happiness passed by and, feigning that he would be thus 
everywhere, lured me away.. . .the ridge by the Lake side where, of a June evening, I 
caught the rare 'Particolored Hawk' (Ampelophaga versicolor) I would also have 
remembered out of my own experiences, the Canada shore in the distance and all  about 
me the lovely scenery of Western New York" (Grote, 1886). When he finally put his 
memories to paper, quite probably Grote had his 1877 notes at hand, as the specimens 
mentioned in the essay had long since left his possession, and even his unusual sense of 
recollection could hardly account for the precision of detail. Transformed by Grote's 
literary skill, the result has given delight to those who have had access to the original in 
m e  Entomologist's Record, or have read the abridgement in Patrick Matthews' The 
Pursuit of Moths and Butterflies (London, 1957). 
LITERATURE CITED 
Allan, P. B. M. 1948. Moths and memories. London. 
Grote, A. R. 1877a. [Untitled letter in correspondence column.] Canad. Entomol. 
9:119-120. 
. 1877b. Notes on Noctuidae. Canad. Entomol. 9:196-200. 
. 1886. North American Lepidoptera: The hawk moths of North 
America. Bremen. 
. 1894. Notes on nocturnal Lepidoptera. Canad. Entomol. 26:79-86. 
. 1895. Collecting Noctuidae by Lake Erie. Entomol. Rec. 6:97-101, 
121-125. 
Matthews, P. 1957. The pursuit of moths and butterflies. London. 
Smith, 1. B. 1893. A catalogue, bibliographical and synonymical, of the species of moths 
of the lepidopterous superfamily Noctuidae, found in boreal America. Bull. U.S.N.M. 
44. Washington, D.C. 
Van Duzee, E. P. 1891. List of the macrolepidoptera of Buffalo and vicinity. Bull. 
Buffalo Soc. Nat. Sci. 5:105-166. 
Wilkinson, R. S. 1971. Foreword. In Grote, A. R. An illustrated essay on the Noctuidae 
of North America. Hampton, Middlesex. 
3
Wilkinson: The Genesis of A.R. Grote's "Collecting Noctuidae by Lake Erie"
Published by ValpoScholar, 1974


The Genesis of A.R. Grote\u27s  Collecting Noctuidae by Lake Erie

Valparaiso University

The Great Lakes Entomologist Volume 7 Number 1 -- Spring 1974 Number 1 -- Spring 1974 Article 4 March 1974 The Genesis of A.R. Grote's "Collecting Noctuidae by Lake Erie" Ronald S. Wilkinson The Library of Congress Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.valpo.edu/tgle  Part of the Entomology Commons Recommended Citation Wilkinson, Ronald S. 1974. "The Genesis of A.R. Grote's "Collecting Noctuidae by Lake Erie"," The Great Lakes Entomologist, vol 7 (1) Available at: https://scholar.valpo.edu/tgle/vol7/iss1/4 This Peer-Review Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Biology at ValpoScholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Great Lakes Entomologist by an authorized administrator of ValpoScholar. For more information, please contact a ValpoScholar staff member at scholar@valpo.edu. THE GREAT LAKES ENTOMOLOGIST Vol. 7,  No. 1 THE GENESIS OF  A.  R. GROTE'S "COLLECTING NOCTUIDAE BY LAKE ERIE" Ronald S. Wilkinson The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 Since its serial publication in The Entomologist's Record during 1895, Augustus Radcliffe Grote's "Collecting Noctuidae by Lake Erie" has become a minor classic of entomological literature. This brief but  compelling reminiscence of two and a half months under canvas has long been considered one of the finest of the many accounts which have been written about the pursuit of Lepidoptera, and it is especially treasured by those collectors who, like Grote at  Lake Erie, have used the method of 'sugaring' to capture moths. Surely much of the essay's appeal is due to Grote's facile and unusually colorful literary style; as P. B. M. Allan (1948) has observed, "it is given to but  few of us to paint like that." Although Grote's account was not  published until 1895, his spring sojourn near Lake Erie dated from almost two decades earlier. He did not  mention the year in his essay, but  evidence in several of his other papers indicates that it was 1877. Grote was then director of the museum of the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences (Wilkinson, 1971), and in his spare time was collecting widely in the Buffalo area to add to  the museum's holdings and augment his own collection of Lepidoptera, then on deposit at the Society. The local list of his friend E. P. Van Duzee (1891) gives some idea of the scope of Grote's efforts near Buffalo, although the Grote collection had gone to the British Museum long before Van Duzee's paper, and its data were not  available to him. Toward the end of April, 1877, Grote made his way from Buffalo southwest through Erie County to Evans Township, where upon "the inner of the two over-lapping, high and wooded, sandy ridges which run parallel with the south shore of Lake Erie," he pitched his tent "before the new green had fully clothed the trees" (Grote, 1895). Although Grote did not indicate the exact locality of his camp, references to  the nearby town of Angola and the presence of a creek enable identification of the approximate area on a map (Fig. 1). We may suppose from the evidence he gives that his routine was fairly regular; each evening he chose a succession of trees and 'sugared' them with a mixture of beer and molasses, afterwards making his rounds with a bull's-eye lantern, net and wide-mouthed collecting bottles with corks, periodically emptying his captures into a larger cyanide-charged store jar and, after the late nineteenth-century fashion, fully mounting his moths in camp the next day. The bare scientific chronology of his activities gives little indication of the flavor of the essay which he eventually wrote. Grote's first captures were from such early genera as Lithophane and Eupsilia, and on the first of May he took his first Habrosyne scripta (Gosse) (Thyatiridae), "a tiny three-cornered bit of fluffy pinkness"; it was followed by another Thyatirid, Pseudothyatira cjwzatophoroides (Guende), of which he captured a good series. As the early spring Noctuids gave way to those of May, Apatela, Agrotis, Mamestra, Xylena and other genera appeared, and he became much more particular as his spreading-boards filled. On June 8 Grote, who could not long withhold information from his favorite journals, sent a brief communication from his lakeshore locality to The Canadian Entornologist, announcing that "Entomology can be pursued with great success when camping out," and listing fifteen species of Lepidoptera which he had recently taken at  bait, including four Sphingids. Grote was especially charmed by Darapsa versicolor (Harris), of which he took one and saw another, quoting Marcus Aurelius to characterize the moth: "that which is beautiful is beautiful in itself; the praise of man adds nothing to it" (Grote, 1877a). In June Septis ligrlicolora (Guende) and S. arctica (Boisduval) were especially common, the latter becoming "a decided nuisance" (Grote, 1895), and they were soon joined by a number of Deltoids, which especially interested Grote. Of these he took a Zarzclognatha which at  first appeared to be a new species, but  he later decided it to be an extraordinary variety of his own laevigata. Like many American collectors after him, 1Wilkinson: The Genesis of A.R. Grote's "Collecting Noctuidae by Lake Erie"Published by ValpoScholar, 19741974 THE GREAT LAKES ENTOMOLOGIST 17  Fig. 1. The approximate location of A. R .  Grote's 1877 camp near Lake Erie. From a nineteenth-century map of the Buffalo, N.Y. region, in the collections of the  Library of Congress. Grote was amused by the antics of flying squirrels at his bait, and he captured several with his net and kept them in a box-cage for several days. The genus Catocala, an old favorite of Grote's, began to appear in late June, and in July the underwings "swarmed like bats" about his camp. Beginning with clintoni Grote, he took eighteen species of Catocala in his restricted locality, over half the number reported by Van Duzee (1891) for the greater Buffalo region. As a happy finale t o  his expedition, Grote captured at the light of his tent some Noetuids, thcn rare in collections, which did not  come to his bait; he considered the best to be Panthra acronyctoides (Walker), Ortcocnernis riparia Morrison and Plusia thyatyroides Guende. In mid-July he had to return to Buffalo with his specimens and notes, and the first of a half-dozen of his captures to be described as new species was 2The Great Lakes Entomologist, Vol. 7, No. 1 [1974], Art. 4https://scholar.valpo.edu/tgle/vol7/iss1/418 THE GREAT LAKES ENTOMOLOGIST Vol. 7, No. 1 reported to  The Canadian Entomologist in October; it was Pallachira (now Hormisa) bivittata (Grote, 1877b). In the same month he revisited the site near Angola, and later described the scene in a passage which well illustrates the style of "Collecting Noctuidae by Lake Erie": "It was a lovely late October day, the leaves all ripely floating to the ground amid a stillness broken only by the noise of dropping chestnut burrs. The air itself was saturated with hazy light, the memory of summer days. Some autumn Spanner moths were lazily fluttering about, coloured like the yellow leaves. . . ." (Grote, 1895). The vivid language of "Collecting Noctuidae by Lake Erie" might suggest that Grote's essay was written soon after the event, but this was not the case, for in it he quoted passages from an unidentified work, the "latest. . .on the British Musuem 'types'," in reality John B. Smith's Catalogue. . .of the. . .lepidopterous superfamily Noctuidae, found in boreal America (Washington, 1893), continuing his protracted disagreement with Smith over Francis Walker's types and his own names. He attacked the new catalogue for "the animus which has guided the whole enquiry, and which has resulted in cutting down the nearly 800 species of North American Noctuidae, originally described by me, to about 650." Grote, who had left the United States in 1884, was residing in Bremen, Germany when Smith's catalogue was published (Wilkinson, 1971), and he first referred to  it in print in his "Notes on nocturnal Lepidoptera," in the March, 1894 Canadian Ento- mologist. Grote's censure of Smith in "Collecting Noctuidae by Lake Erie" indicates that the essay was written in 1894 or early 1895. Grote's mood during his German years often turned to reverie, and at times he recalled his happier American experiences as would a man in exile; the word itself even appeared in his publications (e.g. Grote, 18861, although the decision to emigrate was his own. As early as 1886 he had recalled his old camp, and written that '%y the Lake at Buffalo, Time, winged with happiness passed by and, feigning that he would be thus everywhere, lured me away.. . .the ridge by the Lake side where, of a June evening, I caught the rare 'Particolored Hawk' (Ampelophaga versicolor) I would also have remembered out of my own experiences, the Canada shore in the distance and all  about me the lovely scenery of Western New York" (Grote, 1886). When he finally put his memories to paper, quite probably Grote had his 1877 notes at hand, as the specimens mentioned in the essay had long since left his possession, and even his unusual sense of recollection could hardly account for the precision of detail. Transformed by Grote's literary skill, the result has given delight to those who have had access to the original in m e  Entomologist's Record, or have read the abridgement in Patrick Matthews' The Pursuit of Moths and Butterflies (London, 1957). LITERATURE CITED Allan, P. B. M. 1948. Moths and memories. London. Grote, A. R. 1877a. [Untitled letter in correspondence column.] Canad. Entomol. 9:119-120. . 1877b. Notes on Noctuidae. Canad. Entomol. 9:196-200. . 1886. North American Lepidoptera: The hawk moths of North America. Bremen. . 1894. Notes on nocturnal Lepidoptera. Canad. Entomol. 26:79-86. . 1895. Collecting Noctuidae by Lake Erie. Entomol. Rec. 6:97-101, 121-125. Matthews, P. 1957. The pursuit of moths and butterflies. London. Smith, 1. B. 1893. A catalogue, bibliographical and synonymical, of the species of moths of the lepidopterous superfamily Noctuidae, found in boreal America. Bull. U.S.N.M. 44. Washington, D.C. Van Duzee, E. P. 1891. List of the macrolepidoptera of Buffalo and vicinity. Bull. Buffalo Soc. Nat. Sci. 5:105-166. Wilkinson, R. S. 1971. Foreword. In Grote, A. R. An illustrated essay on the Noctuidae of North America. Hampton, Middlesex. 3Wilkinson: The Genesis of A.R. Grote's "Collecting Noctuidae by Lake Erie"Published by ValpoScholar, 1974

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The Genesis of A.R. Grote\u27s Collecting Noctuidae by Lake Erie

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