84 THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 



giraffe was exalted because of its tongue, or of the sensitive papillae ! If 

 a Lycsenid butterfly, expanding half an inch, has papillae on his tongue 

 twice as long in proportion as his great neighbour Papilio, he probably 

 has need of them, and it is pleasant to think he has got them, and is 

 comfortable, and his gastronomic enjoyment big for his size. Surely that 

 " prime feature" does not outweigh the " curious resemblances " spoken 

 of as running through the whole life history. 



« 



The resemblance between the pupating habit of the Papilionidae and 

 the Hesperidae must be a very obscure and distant one, if, as is stated 

 in B. N. E., 72, it has been observed by no author save Mr. Scudder. 

 The facts have been known from the day of Linnaeus to every systematist ; 

 but no one has thought of any particular resemblance between the styles 

 of pupating. And now that Mr. Scudder expatiates eloquently upon it, 

 I, for one, fail to see the point. There are attachments of the pupae that 

 are clear, but they are very different. But allowing all that the author 

 claims, inasmuch as he denies that he has ever said that the Papilionidse 

 were evolved from the Hesperidae, one of these modes of attachment 

 cannot have grown out of the other ; one is no advance on the other. It 

 is held that both families were evolved out of a " common stock," but 

 what feature that stock had no man can tell.* It may not have been a 

 moth ; but the moths and butterflies may both have arisen independently 

 from something else and now unknown. Any resemblance, therefore, 

 whether distant or near, must be charged to the conditions and environ- 

 ment when the types of these families first appeared, and of that we can 

 and shall know nothing. " The necessities " may as well have been 

 " overwhelmingly great" in this case as in the one cited by Mr. Scudder, 

 and being the same for both types, there may have resulted a form of 

 attachment suited to each, and bearing some resemblance. But this 

 involves no relationship. In other words, resemblance is not identity, 

 nor does it imply identity. 



As the argument runs, the moths pupate inside a cocoon, with no 



* I am informed by Prof. J. A. Lintner that suspension of pupa is very rare among 

 the moths, but that cases occur in which certain members of a family are suspended by 

 the tail alone, and others of same family by both tail and girdle. " In the GeometridK, 

 the pupa of the Ephyridte is suspended by the tail, and in some of the species there is 

 also a transverse girdle as in the Papilionidce." That is a queer state of things if one 

 mode of suspension is more advanced than the other, or than none at all. Among the 

 moths what are called the higher families are not suspended. Some pupate naked, some 

 in cocoons, and neither mode implies rank. 



