400 SEXUAL SELECTION. Part II. 



and I have been assured by a friend, that these moths 

 repeatedly visited flowers painted on the walls of a room 

 in the South of France. The common white butterfly, 

 as I hear from Mr. Doubleday, often flies down to a bit 

 of paper on the ground, no doubt mistaking it for one of 

 its own species. Mr. Collingwood 17 in speaking of the 

 difficulty of collecting certain butterflies in the Malay 

 Archipelago, states that " a dead specimen pinned upon 

 " a conspicuous twig will often arrest an insect of the 

 " same species in its headlong flight, and bring it down 

 " within easy reach of the net, especially if it be of the 

 " opposite sex." 



The courtship of butterflies is a prolonged affair. The 

 males sometimes fight together in rivalry ; and many 

 may be seen pursuing or crowding round the same 

 female. If, then, the females do not prefer one male to 

 another, the pairing must be left to mere chance, and 

 this does not appear to me a probable event. If, on the 

 other hand, the females habitually, or even occasionally, 

 prefer the more beautiful males, the colours of the latter 

 will have been rendered brighter by degrees, and will 

 have been transmitted to both sexes or to one sex, 

 according to which law of inheritance prevailed. The 

 process of sexual selection will have been much facili- 

 tated, if the conclusions arrived at from various kinds of 

 evidence in the supplement to the ninth chapter can be 

 trusted ; namely that the males of many Lepidoptera, 

 at least in the imago state, greatly exceed in number 

 the females. 



Some facts, however, are opposed to the belief that 

 female butterflies prefer the more beautiful males ; thus, 

 as I have been assured by several observers, fresh females 

 may frequently be seen paired with battered, faded or 



17 ' Eambles of a Naturalist in the Chinese Seas,' 1868, p. 182. 



