Science: Butterfly Farmer

If his parents had had their way—and in 19th century England, parents usually did—Leonard Woods Newman would have been a London tobacco broker. Apprenticed at 18, he began his career dutifully enough. Then, one warm June morning as he pedaled his bicycle to the Bexley railroad station, he fell in love—with a swarm of Clouded Yellow butterflies.

After that, no office could hold him. For the rest of his life, with the pure, cold, scientific passion of a lepidopterist, he was true to butterflies. He even found a girl who was willing to spend...