900 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
In 1878 and 1884, he was again in Europe, in each pro¬ 
tracted journey being accompanied by one of his two daughters. 
In 1883, he entered Portland by the first Northern Pacific 
train. During this period and thereafter, Dr. Butler was al¬ 
most annually upon some interesting and usually prolonged 
tour—to Mexico, Cuba, Canada and other outlying Ameri¬ 
can lands, and in the course of his several trips intimately vis¬ 
ited each of the United States. In his seventy-sixth year, the 
indefatigable savant, the Wanderlust still strongly possessing 
him, rounded out his long career of studious travel by journey¬ 
ing alone around the globe. Leaving home in July 1890, he 
visited Japan, China and India, in each of which he tarried 
long, and through the portal of the Suez Canal revisited his be¬ 
loved Europe, this time venturing as far as North Cape. He 
reached Madison in September 1891, after a variety of quite 
unusual experiences, which furnished him with a large fund 
of aneodlote and lecture material through the fourteen happy 
years that still lay before him. 
On the twenty-first of April 1845, while teaching at Nor¬ 
wich, Professor Butler married Anna, daughter of Joshua 
Bates, for many years president of his alma mater, Middlebury 
college. Their family life was ideal. Mrs. Butler, a woman 
of great strength and originality of character, died at Madison 
in 1892, leaving four children, who survive their father: 
James D., Henry S., and Miss Anna Butler of Superior, and 
Mrs. Benjamin W. Snow of Madison. 
Following the career of a scholar, Professor Butler practi¬ 
cally took no part in public affairs; but he was an active mem¬ 
ber of several learned societies, before whose meetings he fre¬ 
quently appeared and to whose publications he regularly con¬ 
tributed. The American Antiquarian society early claimed 
him (1854) as an associate; he belonged also to the New Eng¬ 
land Historic Genealogical society, and was a corresponding 
member of the Massachusetts Historical society; from 1867 
until 1900, he served as a curator of the Wisconsin Historical 
society, and during the last decade of that term as one of its 
vice-presidents; he was one of the oldest members of this Acad- 
