To most of us, butterflies are charming ephemera that flutter in and out of our lives. But for a certain species of 19th-century gentleman, the stalking and archiving of butterflies was the very height of outdoors adventure.

Prominent among those eccentric, sometimes otherworldly creatures was Titian Ramsay Peale II, an artist and naturalist who made the study of Lepidoptera his life’s calling. Now, 130 years after Peale’s death, connoisseurs of moths, butterflies and caterpillars can for the first time revel in his vivid illustrations, meant to accompany his manuscript “The Butterflies of North America, Diurnal Lepidoptera: Whence They Come, Where They Go, and What They Do.”

The book, unfinished and unpublished when Peale died in 1885, represents more than 50 years of work. The manuscript ended up in the rare book collection of the American Museum of Natural History, where it somehow languished after it was donated by a family member in 1916. All of Peale’s artwork and some of his field notes from the manuscript are being published next week as “The Butterflies of North America: Titian Peale’s Lost Manuscript.”