Mere moth or merveille du jour?

Moths might live in the shadows of their more flamboyant butterfly counterparts, but some have equally artistic names, thanks to a 'golden' group, discovers Peter Marren

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THE names of our butterflies are so familiar now that it is easy to miss how strange they are. Some are baldly descriptive: there's a large white (Pieris brassicae) and a small white (Pieris rapae); a large blue (Phengaris arion) and a small blue (Cupido minimus). Yet we also have the more cryptic grayling (Hipparchia semele), gatekeeper (Pyronia tithonus), Scotch argus (Erebia aethiops) and wall (Lasiommata megera). We have a quintet with linear markings called hairstreaks and a group with chequered wings called fritillaries. These names are full of words that passed out of everyday use some time ago.

Who coined these unusual monikers? Who decided that one butterfly looked like a wall and that another recalled the many-eyed guardian Argus? It is possible to trace the history of butterfly names in a succession of beautifully illustrated books published during the 18th and early 19th centuries. It emerges that the point of origin is the world's earliest entomological society, which was founded in London about 300 years ago.

It was called the Society of Aurelians or, simply, the Aurelians. Aurelian-'the golden one was the 18th-century word for what we would now call a lepidopterist, one who is keenly interested in the Lepidoptera, the family of butterflies and moths.

We know about some of the society's members and none of them was what we would call a scientist. Instead, they were artists, designers, men of letters and traders in silk and other fabrics. What seems to have united them was a keen sense of beauty. They were all men-formal clubs were men only-but some Society ladies were equally entranced by butterflies and moths, including Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, Duchess of Portland, one of the original Bluestockings. A pretty moth, the Portland, is still named after her.