'Where Love directs, a Libertine it roves'

 Born on this day in 1698 was Henry Baker, naturalist and man of many parts. He began his working life apprenticed to a bookseller, but soon after that he acquired a reputation as a therapist, apparently having great success with deaf people, using a system that he kept secret. His medical work brought him to the attention of Daniel Defoe, with whom he launched the Universal Spectator and Weekly Journal in 1728, and whose youngest daughter he married in 1730. But his activities were largely focused on scientific inquiry, specialising in microscopy, and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, among other distinctions. He was also a member of the Society of Aurelians, the first entomological society in the world, whose members devoted themselves to the study of butterflies, moths and other insects (and also to having a good time whenever they got together). 
  Baker claimed most of the credit for a magnificent illustrated book written by his fellow Aurelian Benjamin Wilkes, English Moths and Butterflies. It was, he claimed, 'in some sort my own child, having myself compiled it and put it in the order it is now, from Mr. Wilkes memorandums, he being indefatigable in his observations and faithful in the minuting down every particular but for the want of learning quite incapable of writing a book.' Charming... However, Baker, who was also something of a poet, did furnish Wilkes's book with a rhapsodic, if excessively pious, introductory poem:

 See, to the Sun the Butterfly displays
His glistering Wings and wantons in his Rays:
In Life exulting o’er the Meadow flies,
Sips from each Flow’r and breathes the vernal Skies.
His splendid Plumes, in graceful order show
The various glories of the painted Bow.
Where Love directs, a Libertine it roves,
And courts the fair ones through the verdant Groves.
How glorious now! How chang’d since Yesterday
When on the ground a crawling Worm it lay,
Where ev’ry foot might tread its Soul away!
Who rais’d it thence and bid it range the Skies?
Gave its rich plumage and its brilliant Dyes?
’Twas God: its God and thine, O Man, and He
In this thy fellow Creature lets thee see
The wond’rous Change that is ordained for thee.
Thou too shalt leave thy reptile form behind,
And mount the Skies, a pure ethereal Mind,
There range among the Stars, all pure and unconfin’d.