How to Know the Butterflies

The Cornell classic that taught America to name what it saw: every eastern butterfly described from life, with its caterpillar, its food-plants, its habits — and how to pronounce its Latin.

About the Book

1904Published
John Henry Comstock and Anna Botsford ComstockAuthor
281Butterflies

How to Know the Butterflies (1904) came out of Cornell, where John Henry Comstock taught entomology and Anna Botsford Comstock more or less invented American nature study. It is a field guide with a teacher's manners: it assumes you know nothing and treats you as capable of everything.

Part I explains what a butterfly is — structure, the scales that colour it, the metamorphosis. Parts II and III work through the families of the eastern United States, each species with its caterpillar, its food-plants, its habits and its plate.

Its quiet kindness is the pronunciation: every scientific name is respelled phonetically, because the authors knew readers were embarrassed to say them. This site gathers all of those into one Pronouncing Table.

This site reproduces the complete text of the original 1904 edition, digitized page by page from the original printing. The book is in the public domain.

Rights & ReuseThe complete text of How to Know the Butterflies (1904) is in the public domain in the United States — like all works published before 1928 — and is free to read, download, quote, teach from, and reuse. This digital edition (its transcription, restored plates, and site design) is © 2026 PhotoOpAI, and any editorial commentary we add is clearly marked as ours; the underlying public-domain text carries no such restriction.