L.C.HIGCINS AND N.D.RILEY
Field Guide to the Butterflies of Britain and
Europe
In my early boyhood, almost sixty-five years ago, I would
quiver with helpless rage when Hofmann in his then famous
Die Gross-Schmetterlinge Europas failed to figure the
rarity he described in the text. No such frustration awaits the
young reader of the marvelous guide to the Palaearctic
butterflies west of the Russian frontier now produced by-Lionel
C. Higgins, author of important papers on Lep-idoptera, and
Norman D. Riley, keeper of insects at the British Museum. The
exclusion of Russia is (alas) a practical necessity.
Non-utilitarian science does not thrive in that sad and cagey
country; the mild foreign gentleman eager to collect in the
steppes will soon catch his net in a tangle of barbed wire, and
to work out the distribution of Evers-mann's Orange Tip or the
Edda Ringlet would have proved much harder than mapping the
moon. The little maps that the Field Guide does supply for the
fauna it covers seem seldom to err. I note that the range of
the Twin-spot Fritillary and that of the Idas Blue are
incorrectly marked, and I think Nogell's Hairstreak, which
reaches Romania from the east, should have been included. Among
minor shortcomings is the somewhat curt way in which British
butterflies are treated (surely the Norfolk race of the
Swallowtail, which is so different from the Swedish, should
have received more attention). I would say that alder, rather
than spruce, characterizes the habitat of Wolfens-berger's and
Thor's Fritillaries. I regret that the dreadful nickname
"Admiral" is used instead of the old "Admirable." The new
vernacular names are well invented-- and, paradoxically, will
be more attractive to the expert wishing to avoid taxonomic
controversy when indicating a species than to the youngster who
will lap up the Latin in a trice. The checklist of species
would have been considerably more appealing if the names of
authors had not been omitted (a deplorable practice of
commercial origin which impairs a number of recent zoological
and botanical manuals in America).
The choice of important subspecies among the thousands
described in the last hundred years is a somewhat subjective
matter and cannot be discussed here. In deciding whether to
regard a butterfly as a race of its closest ally or as a
separate species the Field Guide displays good judgment
in re-attaching Rebel's Blue to Alcon, and in tying up the
Bryony White with the Green-veined White: anyone who has
walked along a mountain brook in the Valais, the Tessin, and
elsewhere must have noticed the profusion and almost comic
muddle of varicolored intergrades between those two
Whites. In a few cases, however, the authors seem to have
succumbed to the blandishments of the chromosome count. For
better or worse our present notion of species in Lepidoptera is
based solely on the checkable structures of dead specimens, and
if Forster's Furry cannot be distinguished from the Furry Blue
except by its chromosome number, Forster's Furry must be
scrapped.
In many groups the Field Guide accepts the generic
splitting proposed by various specialists. The resulting orgy
of genera may bewilder the innocent reader and irritate the
conservative old lumper. A compromise might be reached by
demoting the genitalically allied genera to the rank of
subgenera within one large genus. Thus, for instance, a large
generic group, called, say, Scolitantides, would include
6 subgenera (pp. 262-271 of the Field Guide, from
Green-underside Blue to Chequered Blue) and a large generic
group, called, say, Plebejus, would include 15 subgenera
(pp. 271-311, Grass Jewel to Eros Blue); what matters, of
course, is not naming or numbering the groups but correctly
assorting the species so as to reflect relationships and
distinctions, and in that sense the Field Guide is
logical and scientific. On the other hand, I must disagree with
the misapplication of the term "f." (meaning "form"). It is
properly used to denote recurrent aberrations, clinal blends,
or seasonal aspects, but it has no taxonomic standing (and
available names for such forms should be quote-marked and
anonymous). This the authors know as well as I do, yet for some
reason they use "f." here and there as a catchall for
altitudinal races and minor subspecies. Particularly odd is
"Boloria graeca balcanica f. tendensis,"' which
is actually Boloria graeca tendensis Higgins, a lovely
and unexpected subspecies for the sake of which I once visited
Limone Piemonte where I found it at about 7000 ft. in the
company of its two congeners, the Shepherd's and the Mountain
Fritillaries. Incidentally, the drabbish figure hardly does
justice to the nacreous pallor of its underside.
These are all trivial flaws which melt away in the book's
aura of authority and honesty, conciseness and completeness,
but there is one fault which I find serious and which should be
corrected in later printings. The explanation facing every
plate should give the exact place and date of capture of every
painted or photographed specimen-- a principle to which the
latest butterfly books rigidly adhere. This our Field
Guide omits to do. In result the young reader will not only
be deprived of a vicarious thrill but will not know if the
specimen came from anywhere near the type locality, whilst the
old lepidopterist may at once perceive that the portrait does
not represent an individual of the typical race. Thus one
doubts that the bright female of the Northern Wall Brown (Pl.
49) comes from the North, and it is a pity that the Poplar
Admirable shown on Pl. 15 should belong to the brownish,
blurrily banded West European sub-species rather than to the
black Scandinavian type race with pure white markings.
The red-stained Corsican Swallowtail (front end-paper) is
surely a printer's freak, not the artist's fancy, and no doubt
will be repaired in due time. Many of Brian Har-greaves"
illustrations are excellent, some are a little crude, a few are
poor; all his butterflies, however, are recognizable, which
after all is the essential purpose. His treatment of wing shape
is sometimes wobbly, for instance in the case of the Heaths
(Pl. 47), and one notes a displeasing tendency to acuminate the
hind-wing margins of some Ringlets (Plates 37, 41, 44). In some
groups of closely allied butterflies Nature seems to have taken
capricious delight in varying from species to species the
design of the hind-wing underside, thinking up fantastic twists
and tints, but never sacrificing the basic generic idea to the
cunning disguise. Brian Hargreaves has not always followed this
interplay of thematic variations within the genus. For example,
in the Clossiana hind-wing undersides the compact jagged
rhythm of the Polar Fritillary's markings, which intensifies
and unifies the Freya scheme, is weakly rendered. The artist
has not understood the affinity with Frigga that dimly
transpires through the design of the Dusky-winged, nor has he
seen the garlands of pattern and the violet tones as connecting
the Arctic Fritillary with Titania, and the latter with Dia.
Otherwise, many such rarely figured butterflies as the Atlas
White, the Fatma Blue, and Chapman's Hairstreak, or such tricky
creatures as the enchanting Blues on Pl. 57 came out remarkably
well. The feat of assembling all those Spanish and African
beauties in one book is not the least glory of Higgins' and
Riley's unique and indispensable manual.
Times Educational Supplement,
London, October 23, 1970
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