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Journal of the Lepidopterists' Society 37(3), 1983, 259
BOOK REVIEW
Large White Butterfly: The Biology, Biochemistry and Physiology of Pieris brassicae (Linnaeus). By John Feltwell. W. Junk Publishers, The Hague. Series Ento-mologica, vol. 18. 542 pp. 1981. $98.00.
Large White Butterfly—it sounds like it is missing a "The" in front—is a very peculiar book. It attempts to be a complete, or nearly complete, literature survey of a very extensively studied animal, Pieris brassicae. It probably isn't complete, but I failed to turn up any references in my own hies that weren't in it—down to Akhmedov's 1967 paper in the proceedings of the Azerbaijanian Academy of Sciences on photoperiodic reactions of Tashkent stocks, or Fernando s in Spolia Zeylandica on host plant selection. One can't get much more arcane than those.
Why do a compilation like this? As Miriam Rothschild says in her foreword, the literature of everything is now very unwieldy. A few years ago I discovered that some experiments I had just published were foreshadowed precisely by Z. Lorkovic in work published in the scientific yearbook of the University of Zagreb in 1928. Missing that reference was fairly easy, but even keeping up with current journals in the library is a nightmare, and those able to do so are increasingly subscribing to computerized literature-search services. Even that has its perils—if you try it with "Large White" as a search word, as I did, you will end up with dozens of papers on the culture of a breed of swine by that name, popular in Eastern Europe. Remarkably, Feltwell did this compilation without computerized assistance. Probably no one will ever do such a job that way again.
Anyone working on any aspect of pierid biology will have recourse to this book for many years to come. Pieris brassicae is the most-studied pierid on most fronts—Colias eurytheme is probably next in line. The extent to which it is legitimate to extrapolate to other pierids, or even to other species placed in the old genus Pieris, is problematical; brassicae and its very close relatives form an odd, isolated pocket in the group, distinguished by a very reduced chromosome number and other things. Still, it is all we've got to compare most things to.
The book is obviously a compilation. The information conveyed is telegraphic, fragmentary, and often so out of context that no real picture of its significance emerges. Of course, much of the information conveyed is trivial, but unless one already knows the field one might be hard-pressed to tell what is important and what is not—in a way, Large White Butterfly is organized like an organic chemistry course, in which, to be safe, you learn everything. Information on aberrations and the like is dated and pretty meaningless when their etiology and developmental context are unexplored. They might be very interesting to developmental biologists, physiologists, or geneticists, but how is one to tell?
This is not a coffee-table book. Despite its price, which works out to 18.3cp a page, there aren't even any color plates (But why should there be, in a book about a black-and-white "bug?"). The book belongs in all major institutional reference libraries, where it will save graduate students, especially, a great deal of travail. If it fails to convey much impression of what the Large White really is, how it lives, and how it fits into its environment, it at least points the way to the original sources. The moral is simple: If you want character development, don't read the phone book like a novel.
Arthur M. Shapiro, Department of Zoology, University of California, Davis, California 95616.