Have you ever wondered how the word ‘butterfly’ came about? What, after all, do butterflies have to do with butter? There have been various tentative explanations but few of them are very convincing. One supposes that the original ‘butter-fly’ was yellow, as yellow as a pat of fresh butter, and so was presumably the bright yellow Brimstone – strictly speaking the male Brimstone since the paler female looks more like margarine. But why should the Brimstone be the progenitor of all butterflies? Yellow is not the principal butterfly colour; far more of them are shades of brown, blue or white. Another theory suggests that ‘butter’ comes from the Saxon word beatan meaning ‘to beat’; it is the insect that flies by beating (rather than buzzing) its wings. You sometimes hear the suggestion that ‘butterfly’ got mixed up with ‘flutterby’. But ‘flutterby’ is a modern word whilst ‘butterfly’ is unfathomably old; word researchers have proved that ‘butterfly’ precedes ‘flutterby’ by at least a thousand years. Yet another proposal is that the original name must have been ‘beauty-fly’. Again, this kite doesn’t fly. The ‘butter’ in ‘butterfly’ does not mean beauty. The one thing we can be reasonably confident about is that ‘butter’ means butter and ‘fly’ means fly.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word ‘butterfly’ originated as the Old English buttorfleoge in an Anglo-Saxon manuscript written about 1,300 years ago.1 It was probably a familiar word even then for the name is common to several North European languages. It is botervlieg in Old Dutch and buttervleige in Old German. A less complimentary name in Dutch is boterschijte – or ‘butter-shit’. This is a cruel libel because butterflies hardly ‘shit’ at all; most of their diet of glucose leavened with salts is converted into energy; it is their caterpillars which are the notable, indeed stupendous shitters. But unless they are very sick, caterpillars’ droppings are hard and friable; they do not resemble butter.
Beetles bite and spiders spin; their names mean, essentially, ‘biter’ and ‘spinner’. Moths are named, rather unkindly, after their ‘maggots’: the little maggots that supposedly munch our woollen socks and pullovers; moths are ‘munchers’. But with butterfly we need to forget about biting and munching and think instead about how ancient tribes might have regarded these bright-winged insects. A clue may lie in another old German word for butterfly, Schmetterling. It comes from Schmetter, a dialect word for cream, and hence the word takes on a similar meaning to butterfly: the ‘little cream-fly’. Even more suggestive is a second folk name from central Europe: Milchdieb or ‘milk-thief ’. Stealing milk or whey is one of the things which, according to Teutonic myth, witches did; they robbed the worthy farmer by tweaking the udders of his cows during the night. Is it possible that butterflies were once associated with milking, or perhaps attracted by the scent from the butter churn? There are accounts from traditional farms in Eastern Europe of white butterflies fluttering over the milk pails. Possibly they are attracted by some pheromone in milk – or perhaps by its colour, just as Purple Emperors are attracted to reflections in puddles or on car roofs. We know that the folk image of butterflies was not always positive. They were, for example, seen in some country districts as bringers of bad luck. One folktale holds that a white moth escapes from the mouth of a witch to carry on her business while she sleeps.2 Such stories are faint echoes of a time when the natural world must have been full of superstition – and fear.
We have the advantage in knowing that, apart from a few crop pests, butterflies are harmless to mankind. The world over, butterflies have impressed people by their airy, graceful flight and brilliant wings. But they were, by the same token, the closest things in nature to how people imagined fairies or spirits. Dragonflies, which most of us now find equally beautiful and attractive, were regarded well into the twentieth century as agents of the devil.3 They looked like stings on wings, and their huge eyes seemed capable of peering right into your soul. Similarly moths, which include some of the loveliest insects on earth, have been tarred and feathered by biblical allusions to their fretting and gnawing; they were seen as the insect equivalent of rust. Spiders, too, have a wholly undeserved evil reputation that clings to them even today. Perhaps we should see the word butterfly in the same light. They were not ‘flutterbyes’ or ‘beauty-flies’ or butter-yellow heralds of spring. They were, rather, sinister spirit-like beings which showed an unhealthy interest in milk from the dairy yard.
The English names of butterflies and moths are unusually poetic. But they are sometimes also rather obscure. Who now would invent words such as ‘admirals’ or ‘arguses’ or ‘hair-streaks’, or describe a particular butterfly as ‘clouded’ or ‘silver-washed’? We take these names for granted and do not consider their oddness. Butterfly names are often described as Victorian. In fact, they are older than that. What is easy to overlook is how apt they are.
Take ‘hairstreak’. Nowadays we would probably say ‘hairline’ but that misses the vibrancy of the word ‘streak’, suggesting, to my ear at least, a flicker, like lightning, or the irregular motion of a pale line across a dark background. The irregular white line on the hindwings of these small, mainly woodland butterflies does seem to twitch as the insect flexes its wings, an effect accentuated by the little tail on the end of each wing. One species, the White-letter Hairstreak, even has a wiggle to the streak of white as though someone has tried to paint a shaky ‘w’ drawn with the thinnest of brushes. It is tempting to suppose that whoever first came up with that word ‘hairstreak’ had watched the living butterfly in its natural habitat and seen for himself that characteristic shake of its wings.
When I first fell in love with butterflies and their funny names, I thought I understood at least one of them. That was ‘fritillary’. My father, who was a keen gardener, told me what a fritillary was. It was a kind of lily, he said, with a hanging, bell-shaped flower. It was pinkish, with chequered markings. I found a picture of one, perhaps on a packet of bulbs, and noticed how the box-shaped flower shared the same pattern as the butterfly. But was the flower named after the butterfly or was it the other way round?
The original fritillary, or fritillus, was neither, it seems, a butterfly nor a lily, but a wooden or ivory box with a chequer-board pattern used for shaking dice.4 It made a good rattle before sending the dice clattering across the gaming table. It was the pattern that was remembered and anglicised as ‘fritillary’, as another word for ‘chequered’. It seems a happy choice of group name for the bright, elegant butterflies with black markings on an orange-brown background, capturing something of their grace and airy dalliance. When I hunted them as a boy we called them ‘frits’. It rhymes with ‘flits’ and that seemed all right too.
I also managed to work out for myself who or what ‘argus’ was. At that time I had never seen a real live Brown Argus butterfly, nor the unrelated Scotch Argus, but I knew that the model for both was a slightly scary figure from the Greek myths, a kind of super-shepherd whose distinguishing feature was the numerous eyes scattered all over the top of his head, like grapes. These gave him all-round vision which proved a tremendous advantage in his shepherding. It also meant that he could work a shift system with some eyes closed and others wide open and alert. Butterflies, I knew, have only two eyes, like us, not the unique and, in evolutionary terms, highly improbable arrangement of Argus the Shepherd. But, in addition to its genuine pair, the little Brown Argus has numerous fake eyes sprinkled all over the undersides of its wings: little black dots each surrounded by a circle of white, six on the forward wing and twelve on the hindwing. These are its ‘argus’ eyes. Being no more than arrangements of scales they are of course blind but, you think, all those little staring eyes might well cause a moment of confusion to a predator, such as a hungry skylark. Alternatively, the confused bird might strike instinctively at one of the fake eyes instead of the real ones. A butterfly can get by with a tear in the wing, but a peck on the head brings down the curtain. Argus, I thought, is really a rather good name for this kind of butterfly. And a memorable one too: much better than ‘Little Brown’ or ‘Dainty Dipper’, which is probably what we would call it today.
By contrast, modern English names, of the kind coined for other insects such as ladybirds or dragonflies, are more pragmatic than poetic. They have little truck with art or mythology, and are invented not so much in a spirit of admiration as an aid to identification. In the case of dragonflies, many of their names are based on flight behaviour. One group are the ‘skimmers’, named from their habit of flying close to the water’s surface; others are ‘hawkers’ which patrol the pond margin. The ‘darters’ skitter about over the water whilst the ‘chasers’ pursue their prey across the pond. If butterflies had gone down that route we might have gliders, soarers and flutterers.
Bumblebee names are even more boring. Many of them are named after the tuft of coloured hair on their rear ends – the ‘bum’ in bumblebee, so to speak – such as the Buff-tailed Bumblebee and the Red-tailed Bumblebee. The names of ladybirds are, if possible, even less imaginative, being based mainly on a spot count so that you start with the two-spot ladybird and end at the twenty-four-spot via most numbers in between. By the same token butterflies might have been named from their spots or tails.
It is often pointed out that butterfly names are unscientific. The Marbled White is not related to the Large White, the Red Admiral isn’t a close relative of the White Admiral and the Brown Argus has nothing in common with a Scotch Argus. But what they have instead, and which is much more unusual, is ‘cultural resonance’. The names of butterflies draw us into a world where art meets science, often producing names which scintillate in the mind and engage our feelings, a place denied to multi-spotted ladybirds or coloured bumble-bums.
It took a surprisingly long time for butterfly names to ‘evolve’. Let us begin at the usual beginning, with the dazzled descriptions of the Tudor physician, Thomas Moffet. In his treatise on the ‘lesser living Creatures’, The Theatre of Insects, written around 1589, Moffet made clear his admiration for butterflies by devoting a whole chapter to them.5 But although he managed to illustrate around two dozen kinds with crude woodcuts, he had no names for them. He had difficulty describing them, too, since there were no existing words for insect anatomy either. Instead Moffet drew on his knowledge of birds and beasts so that his butterflies have a ‘belly’ as well as a ‘snout’ and a ‘beak’, and also ‘horns’ or ‘cornicles’ since their antennae stick out like the horns of a bull.
Moffet knew, or thought he knew, a few hard butterfly facts. He knew that some kinds lived longer than others and that they approached winter in a ‘languishing condition’. Tortoiseshell butterflies survived the coldest months for Moffet had found them in his house, ‘sleeping all the winter like Serpents or Bears, in windows, in chinks and corners’. He believed the old story that certain large moths attack sleeping butterflies by night, beating them with their wings ‘as great Tyrants devour and spoil their subjects’.
Without names to give them, Moffet drew on his literary gifts to try to do justice to their colours and patterns. In the wings of his Peacock butterfly, for example, he saw ‘four Adamants [i.e. diamonds] glistering in a bezel of Hyacinth’ which ‘shine curiously like stars, and do cast about them sparks of the Rain-bow’. You could regard it as ‘the Queen or chiefest’ of all the butterflies, he suggested.
He was less enamoured of the Painted Lady, which lacks the Peacock’s iridiscence, though he did note its resemblance to the skin of ladies who spend most of their time indoors: ‘Nature bred this [butterfly] with a chamblet-mingled coat [i.e. a garment made of fine cloth], but it wants lively colours, for the wings are of a black reddish fading yellow and russet colours, and it is more beautiful for its soft skin, than for its gallant apparel.’
He admired fritillaries, too, especially those with silver spots inset into the hindwing like pearls. One in particular ‘holds forth a rare list of oriental Pearls shining in blue, the upper wings being of a flaming yellow, show[ing] like fire’. It is hard to be certain which one he meant but it might have been the Pearl-bordered Fritillary, once a common springtime butterfly.
It was in words like these, owing more to art than science, that butterflies first entered the consciousness of the curious-minded. Colourful, gem-studded butterflies such as Peacock, Small Tortoiseshell and the Pearl-bordered Fritillary showed off ‘the elegancy of Nature’. But since almost nothing was known about them, the best anyone could do was, in Moffet’s words, ‘to admire the work of a bountiful God, the author and giver of such rich treasure’.6
Awkward labels, rather than names, also mark the work of the great naturalist John Ray (1627–1705), the Essex parson-naturalist who set about ordering the various kinds of insects, although he never got much further than the butterflies and moths. He realised that without names it was impossible to talk intelligently about butterflies. He knew only a few: country names like fritillary, tortoiseshell, ‘painted lady’, ‘peacock’s-eye’, and, more surprisingly, ‘small heath’. But Ray preferred the device of short descriptive tags in Latin which were as learned as they were impracticable. Nor were they particularly imaginative. His tag for the Marbled White, for example, translates as a ‘Butterfly of middle size with wings beautifully variegated with black and white’.7
No one was going to call it that. Fortunately there was at least one contemporary who saw the need to invent simple names where none existed. We have met him before. He was the collector of squashed butterflies, the patron and friend of Elinor Glanville, James Petiver.
Petiver needed names. He made a practice of publishing short descriptions and simple engravings of butterflies and moths in self-published catalogues he called Gazophylacia (or ‘chests of valuables’). It seems to have been Petiver who gave us the basic vocabulary of butterfly names: ‘hairstreak’, ‘argus’, ‘fritillary’, ‘brimstone’, ‘admiral’ and ‘brown’. Not many of his full names have stood the test of time, and anyhow he kept changing them, but Petiver deserves the credit for at least the idea of a proper name, in English, for every species of butterfly.8
Some of his early efforts were close in spirit to Ray’s descriptive tags, such as his ‘brown-eyed-Butterfly with yellow Circles’ (the Ringlet) or ‘small golden black-spotted Meadow Butterfly’ (the Small Copper). Petiver also had a habit of naming a species after the person who brought it to him, such as ‘Handley’s brown Butterfly’, now better known as the Dingy Skipper. Others he named after the place where they were first found, such as Enfield Eye for the Speckled Wood or Tunbridge Grayling, soon to be simplified to Grayling. His first specimen of the beautiful Swallowtail was ‘caught by my ingenious friend Mr Tilleman Bobart’ and named ‘The Royal William’ after the reigning king, William III, perhaps because it had been caught in the garden at St James’s Palace. Only half a century later, when memories of King Billy were dimming, was the name changed to the Swallowtail.
Of all Petiver’s forgotten names, the one I most regret is ‘hog’ (he seems to have pronounced it ‘og’) for the small, chubby butterflies now known as skippers. As the most moth-like of butterflies, with their broad ‘faces’ and little black eyes, they do conjure up images of fairy pigs, especially when the fawn blur of their wings preserves the plump body in sharp focus, like a hummingbird. Petiver knew only two kinds of hog, his large ‘Cloudy Hog’ and the slightly smaller and brighter ‘Golden Hog’. Later on they were renamed the Large and Small Skipper respectively, after their characteristic skipping flight. Perhaps ‘skippers’ seemed more dignified than ‘hogs’. And so, alas, we lost our little flying pigs.
By the time The English Moths and Butterflies by Benjamin Wilkes was published in 1748, many butterflies had acquired the names by which they are known today, including Clouded Yellow, Orange-tip, High Brown Fritillary and Purple Emperor. All these names incorporate a colour, and it might be significant that Benjamin Wilkes and many of his fellow ‘Aurelians’ were professional artists; his card describes him as a painter ‘of History Pieces and Portraits in Oyl’.9 It was surely an artist’s colour sense and imagination that produced such timeless names as Clouded Yellow and High Brown Fritillary (‘high’ meant richly coloured, and not a reference to high-flying habits). The name Silver-washed Fritillary so perfectly describes the pearlescent smears and floods of silver on the butterfly’s hindwings that you can almost see Wilkes’s brush reproducing the effect.
Moses Harris (1730–c.1788), who painted perhaps the most beautiful of all historic butterfly pictures, seems to have had a particular talent for names.10 It comes out most clearly in those he coined for moths which include such novelties as the Merveille du Jour and the True Lover’s Knot. Harris is exceptional in that he sometimes explains what he had in mind. The butterfly hitherto known as the London Eye or Great Argus, for example, he renamed ‘the Wall’ – not so much because of its wing pattern, even though it is rather brick-like, but because ‘it frequently settles against a field bank, or perhaps against the Side of a Wall; and is for this Reason, called THE WALL FLIE’. He also introduced the Gatekeeper as an appropriate and pleasing name for a butterfly that loves to fly along ‘the sides of hedges in lanes and meadows’. Others with the same ring of originality include the Speckled Wood, the Silver-studded Blue (‘stud’ is exactly right for its tiny, diamond-bright twinkles) and Camberwell Beauty. Harris also gave us the Duke of Burgundy but in its case he unfortunately forgot to tell us what he meant by it.
Hence most of our butterfly names are not Victorian. They are from the century before Victoria and so broadly Georgian – or in a few cases older still: Williamite or ‘Annian’. By the end of the eighteenth century the poetic flights of earlier times were receding. The last of the classic Georgian butterfly books, William Lewin’s Papilios of Great Britain, gave us the Large Blue and Small Blue – dull names compared with ‘Adonis’ and ‘Silver-studded’ blues. Lewin also changed one of Harris’s compositions, the ‘Dishclout or Greasey Fritillary’ to the more prosaic Marsh Fritillary. The chequered butterfly hitherto known as ‘Vernon’s Half-mourner’ – from a form of mourning dress that allowed white as well as black – became the Bath White. Lewin’s explanation was that a young lady from Bath had commemorated that butterfly in a piece of needlework. But anyone visiting that city hoping to see a Bath White butterfly was in for a disappointment.
The probable reason why we still use butterfly names that are upwards of 200 years old is through two pieces of good fortune. The first was the publication of Lepidoptera Britannica by Adrian Haworth in the opening years of the nineteenth century. This became the standard text on the classification of butterflies for the rest of the century and, as it were, fixed the English names in aspic (though Haworth would much rather you used the Latin names of Linnaeus). The few new butterfly discoveries of that century slipped naturally into the established system: Scotch Argus, Mountain Ringlet, Black Hairstreak, Essex Skipper. Haworth himself made a few judicious changes: he preferred Chequered Skipper to Spotted Skipper and, less happily perhaps, Silver-spotted Skipper for what had up until then been the Pearl Skipper.
The second piece of good fortune was the long reign of the popular Butterflies of the British Isles (1906) by Richard South which was in effect the standard work for seventy years.11 Its author had the conservative disposition and good sense to stick with the names he had inherited. And no one has seriously sought to change them since then. It seems we like our strange, allusive butterfly names. We may not think about them much – entomologists are not, in general, connoisseurs of language – but unlike modern names they bear witness to how people felt about butterflies. The spirit of the old forgotten pioneers lives on in them, even when we regard them as nothing but labels.
For a long time you could expect to lose credibility in the eyes of fellow entomologists if you dared to call a butterfly a Clouded Yellow instead of edusa. Latin names were the only scientifically correct names; the English ones were strictly for non-scientists. Yet even to scientists, Latin names do not mean much. Few, if any, butterfly books devote space or effort into explaining what they mean and why the species were so named. But they at least meant something to the person who invented them – and unlike the English names, we know who those people were for their surnames, in abbreviated form, follow the binomial scientific name. And when you delve into them you find, more often than not, that it is not impassive science but the same romantic sensibilities at work, deftly disguised within a learned language. You discover analogies with nymphs and shepherds, satyrs and devils, mirrors and jewels, even thoughts and dreams. Latin, quite as much as English, is part of the cultural identity of a butterfly.
By custom, the larger, more colourful butterflies, especially those in the Nymphalidae family, are named after female characters. Most of them are not historical but princesses or minor female deities taken from Ovid, Virgil and other classical poets. Like butterflies, nymphs were supposed to be beautiful and graceful and bring joy into the lives of others. And they were associated with springs, flowery groves and mountain pastures – which are, of course, good habitats for butterflies. For example, the Peacock, Inachis io, is named after Io, a beautiful girl who was seduced by Zeus and then turned into a heifer to prevent his wife taking revenge (Inachis was Io’s father). The White Admiral, Ladoga camilla, commemorates Camilla, a warrior princess from Virgil’s Aeneid (did the name ‘admiral’ require a militant lady?). Cynthia, the name of the Painted Lady, is not so much a character as an inspiration, a muse. The name was a popular one among eighteenth-century lyric poets. It was also an alternative name for Diana the huntress, the goddess of the great outdoors.12
The most flattering names were reserved for the fritillaries. They include the Three Graces. The Pearl-bordered Fritillary is Euphrosyne, bringer of mirth and joy, perhaps a coded reference to how one feels on spotting this bright butterfly on one of the first warm days of the year. The second is Aglaia, the embodiment of beauty and splendour, a name appropriately awarded to the Dark Green Fritillary. The third of the Graces, Thalia, had already been used for another insect. But all that was needed to stay within the rules was a slight modification and so it was as Athalia, the Grace who brings music and song, that the Heath Fritillary was named. Perhaps bursting into song was the natural response to spying the rare Heath Fritillary.
The browns, as suited their more sober colouring, were seen as masculine personalities. They were the Satyrs, goat-footed beings that lived in woods. In keeping with their dark colours, these butterflies sometimes embody shady or unlucky characters. Such is the Gatekeeper’s name of tithonus, named after a foolish youth who begged the gods for everlasting life only to discover that it was a curse. What he got was not eternal youth but eternal decrepitude; wizened and perhaps browned with age he prayed now for death as he was slowly consumed by, in Tennyson’s words, ‘cruel immortality’.
Another gloomy name is Maniola, the genus containing the Meadow Brown and meaning ‘the little shade of the departed’ or, as we might say, ‘the mini-ghost’. The butterfly’s dusky wings suggested the murk of the nether regions where departed souls dwelled. The same thoughts were aroused by even darker butterflies that fly in Europe’s mountains, species of the large genus Erebia, named after Erebus, the mythical region of darkness beneath the world. One of the two British species, the Scotch Argus, Erebia aethiops, takes its other name from the Ethiopian, then a general name for the dark-skinned race of humans. The other, the Mountain Ringlet, Erebia epiphron, is based on a Greek word meaning ‘thoughtful’. That too was suggested by the melancholy hues of the butterfly, though separating it from some very similar-looking European species does indeed require thought. Nor is it a cheerful thought that this, our only true mountain butterfly, may soon become a victim of climate change.
An exception among the browns is the Grayling which is named after a female character, Semele, a mortal beloved of the gods and best known from Handel’s opera of that name. Appropriately to our theme, Semele’s story is a sad one for she perished in the ensuing smoke and flames once Zeus revealed himself to her in all his glory. Perhaps it is only coincidence but the male Grayling does have a smoky look, while its fondness for settling on paths puts you in mind of the best-known aria from that opera, ‘Where’er you walk’.
Anyone who has watched a skipper will know that its flight is not fluttery like other butterflies but a blur of wings, almost a buzz, and more like a moth than a butterfly. The movements of the Small Skipper reminded the entomologist Jacob Hübner of dancers in ancient drama who would hop and skip about the stage, pausing now and again with their hands spread wide in a gesture of amazement or sorrow. Such actors were called the Thymelicos, and so, following that, the skipper’s name Thymelicus sylvestris means ‘the little dancer of the woods’ (there was obviously some muddle here since the Small Skipper actually prefers rough, unshaded grassland). The Large Skipper, on the other hand, flies up from its perch to evict an intruder, returning to its place of rest much as a flycatcher does. Again, Hübner had a name for it: the butterfly became Ochlodes, meaning turbulent or unruly, a reference not only to its agitated flight but also to its ‘character’. Jeremy Thomas described the Large Skipper as a ‘burly little butterfly, darting in golden flashes’.13
A more sinister name, Erynnis, was reserved for the Dingy Skipper which has the habit of flying up from the path with a movement compared by Thomas with ‘aircraft peeling off from a formation’.14 To another German entomologist, Franz Schrank, this restless behaviour suggested the Furies, the ‘Erinyes’, who pursued wrongdoers, hounding them from place to place until their victims were driven mad. In Schrank’s poetic imagination, that was the fate of the Dingy Skipper, for ever pursued by invisible avengers. Its species name, tages, commemorates the same behavioural quirk. In myth, Tages was the boy with the wisdom of an old man who suddenly rose from the ground to instruct the Etruscans in the art of divination.
The Wall is another butterfly that likes to sun itself on the bare soil of footpaths, and it too has a blood-curdling name. It is megera, after Megaera, one of the Furies, who, full of envy and spite, fastens her attentions on adulterers. Its modern genus name is more benign. It is Lasiommata or ‘hairy eyes’, a reminder that butterflies were described from dead, pinned specimens in a collection, for, although the Wall does indeed have ‘eyelashes’ they are difficult to see without a hand lens.
The Danish entomologist Johann Christian Fabricius (1745–1808) was the first person to arrange butterflies into families of related species. He was also the first to distinguish clearly between butterflies and moths. Many of the Latin names ascribed to our butterflies originated in his terse descriptions (themselves often based on collections in London). ‘Fab’ was, it seems, fond of puns and analogies, often obscure ones. He might have missed his vocation as a compiler of cryptic crosswords. Take his teasing name for the Purple Emperor, Apatura iris. Iris presents no difficulty: she is the personification of the rainbow, an obvious allusion to the male butterfly’s dazzling purple iridescence. But Apatura is a real puzzle; evidently a made-up word, possibly an anagram. The most likely explanation for it is that Fabricius had seized on the Greek word apatao, meaning to deceive. The Emperor’s mantle of purple is a question of ‘now you see it, now you don’t’; one moment the butterfly is sombre brown and the next, an eye-wateringly brilliant purple. But Fabricius, too, has become a deceiver by turning the original word into an invented one of his own. He was, you could say, identifying with the butterfly, making a learned little joke which hinges on the idea of deception. For all we know, it might have seemed brilliantly funny in eighteenth-century Denmark.
The butterflies one feels most sorry for are the smallest ones – the blues and skippers – which the great Linnaeus relegated into his sixth and last category of butterflies, Plebejus, the plebs. They were the commoners of the butterfly world, the little workers and peasants, not much bigger than clothes moths. Later on the insult deepened when the tribe of blues was renamed the Plebejus parvi, the poor plebs; even the two cabbage whites were deemed to be in a higher class. This system of classification has long since been consigned to the dustbin but the plebeian label lives on in Plebejus argus, the scientific name of the Silver-studded Blue: a butterfly whose beautiful silver ‘studs’ seem to bely its implied lowly status.
As some compensation, several of our smallest butterflies have particularly beautiful names. It seems fitting, somehow, that the smallest of them all, the Small Blue, Cupido minimus, is named after Cupid, the fluttering love baby with his bow and arrow. And among the most unexpected is the Green Hairstreak’s name: Callophrys rubi or ‘beautiful eyebrows in the bramble’. Close up you can see why: above each dark eye there is a scattering of iridescent scales, like the psychedelic glasses worn by Elton John, while the eye is further outlined in white as though the butterfly were wearing make-up.