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The color and color-patterns of moths and butterflies (1897)

Abstract wing patterns by a scientist who loved butterflies from birth.

The vertical lines demarcate individual wings, distorted and stretched mathematically to fill a tidy rectangular space — an arrangement that Mayer hoped would lead to new insights into the “laws of color-patterns”. This “apparently innate” bend, writes a contemporaneous biographer, drove Mayer to zoology, and away from physics (the profession favored by his father), where his studies “had been failures, due largely to a dislike of the subject.” His passion guided him, eventually, to the laboratory of Alexander Agassiz (famed Harvard natural historian Louis Agassiz’s son), where Mayer would produce the studies and gorgeous illustrations of medusae jellyfish he is remembered for today. This warping, no matter how orderly, “renders the patterns of the most familiar species almost unrecognizable.” They amplify “what may be very slight differences” and obscure the “wonderful similarity” between mimicking butterflies.

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