RELATING TO SECONDARY SEXUAL CHARACTERS. 53 



concealed in loose cotton attracted males. Females were put into a 

 box with an open chimney at one end, the other open end being covered 

 by mosquito-netting. A current of air blew into the open end and out of 

 the chimney. The males flew to the end of the chimney from which 

 the air came and fluttered about in the neighborhood. Males are 

 attracted to places where a female has been kept even several hours 

 after her removal. The male finds the female through the sense-organs 

 in his antennae, for a male whose abdomen has been cut off and the sides 

 of whose thorax are covered with shellac will still fly to the female, 

 but if his antennae be coated with any substance he no longer seeks the 

 female. If the eyes of the males are blackened they will mate with 

 females "in the normal manner." 



Mayer cut off the wings of females and glued male wings in their 

 places, so that the female looked like a male. Males readily mated 

 with these females. The wings of males were cut off and female wings 

 glued in their place. Mating occurred "with normal frequency, and 

 I was unable to detect that the female displayed any unusual aver- 

 sion" to such males. Males with female wings pass unnoticed by other 

 males. 



In a later paper (1901) Mayer and Soule describe how, when the wings 

 of the male were painted scarlet or green, the males were accepted 

 as readily as normals in competition with them. Experiments were also 

 made by them with the gipsy moth. Wingless males met with more 

 " resistance" from the female than do normal males, but when the eyes 

 were covered the wingless males succeeded as often as the normal 

 males, but the number of observations on which this statement is 

 were far too few to be of any value, and there are several other obser- 

 vations that make any such conclusion from the evidence highly 

 uncertain. 



That it is the odor of the females that attracts the male can not be 

 doubted. It might still be claimed that the female chooses amongst 

 her suitors the darkest males, but the evidence gives no grounds for 

 inferring such a choice, and since she will even accept males with 

 female wings when they attempt to mate with her, it does not appar 

 probable that the color of the male is a factor in the result, or at least 

 if it is, then it must be entirely subordinate to the sense of smell in 

 finding the female and of touch after he arrives. These is little or 

 nothing in the behavior of these moths, or in that of the silkworm 

 moth, according to Kellogg, to suggest that vision plays any significant 

 role in courtship. 



Concerning the genetic situation in insects, there are only a few cases 

 that have been studied. The most instructive are those in which more 

 than a single kind of male exists (two or three), one of which may be 

 like the female, the other quite different. The best worked out cases 

 are Papilio memnon and P. polytes. De Meijere and Punnett have 



