Alfred G. Mayer’s *On the Color and Color-Patterns of Moths and Butterflies* (1897) — The Public Domain Review

Mayer’s projections, Wallace writes, “will seem to most naturalists to be a great mistake.” But we might read Color and Color-Patterns not just as the work of a cut-and-dry naturalist, but also as an ode to color itself: “color,” as his biographer notes, “even apart from form.” Plates five through eight stand out from an otherwise monotone tome, with vivid, almost psychedelic swirls of organic color. Each gridded abstraction is moody, atmospheric. In some, strange geometries emerge: gently curving swoops of yellow, rust-red blots, and graceful columns of orange and black. Others are more jagged and phrenetic, with fragmented puzzle pieces of white and yellow and blurring, feathered textures. Mayer’s butterfly wings seem to be an aesthetic indulgence that rises above the simply observational. They undulate, jump off the page, and call to mind the entomological romances Mayer gestured to, at the end of his life, as the kernel of his calling to the natural sciences.