Butterfly Effect

On the third floor of the New York State Museum, in Albany, is a large, windowless room filled with gray metal cabinets, each containing dozens of sealed wooden cases with glass tops. Those cases hold the museum’s priceless butterfly collection of approximately one million specimens. Among those are almost 2,000 specimens that serve as a historical baseline of everything we know about Adirondack butterflies and moths, collected by amateur naturalist William W. Hill.

Hill was born in 1833. By the age of 15 he worked for Nathaniel Wright, owner of an Albany business that manufactured and sold carriage and saddlery