ofpaperandponies:

biomedicalephemera:

From a late 19th century promotional booklet by Chase & Sanborn, importers of tea and coffee. 

Or perhaps I don’t have any Monarchs yet…

“Banded Red Butterfly” is an old common name of the Monarch Butterfly. It was also used for the Viceroy butterfly, but they have that one additional stripe on the bottom wings - what we have here is a Viceroy.

Danaus Plexippus - The Monarch Butterfly

Note the lack of the third line on the lower wings, which Viceroys have. Monarch butterflies are famous for their yearly migration south, ending with forests filled with over-wintering butterflies hanging from trees. This migration actually takes several generations of butterfly to complete - it’s not just one set of individuals flying the entire distance. The fact that milkweed plants are endemic all the way from Mexico to Canada makes this feat possible. 

No other butterflies are known to make a North-South annual migration like birds do.

American Entomology: A Description of the Insects of North America. Thomas Say, 1859.

Those afflicted with “king’s evil” gather ‘round the king to receive the Royal Touch in hopes of a cure.

Using pretty ladies to sell products is nothing new…1902 photograph of a travelling wagon selling “hair tonic”. If anyone saw Sweeney Todd, what Tobias did while working for Pirelli (wearing a long wig, claiming the hair tonic was what caused it to grow) was actually fairly common in England. In America, the hair tonic swindlers tended more towards pretty ladies with naturally long hair (though obviously not the result of the tonic).