THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 87 



insects. There are moths with atrophied wings and legs, carried to a 

 surprising degree ; and plenty of instances among the Coleoptera, but 

 few persons would call the loss of essential organs a mark of " aristo- 

 cratic distinction," as Mr. Scudder does on p. 74, But. N. E. One great 

 family of butterflies is neither fish nor flesh. One sex of a Lycaenid 

 (including the Erycinids) has six useful legs, and is, therefore and thereby 

 a degraded creature, almost, or quite as "low" as a Papilio ; but, its 

 mate has its fore-legs always deformed, often utterly crippled, and, there- 

 fore and thereby, it is separated from its female, fit company for the 

 " aristocratic " Satyrs ! The argument on legs is not tenable. In iact 

 it seems remarkably like nonsense. Deformity can have no ranking 

 value, unless to mark degrees of degradation, and no argument based on 

 the legs of the imago, no matter what their condition, can outweigh that 

 based on every one of the four stages of the insect, 



I put the question to a great authority on biology, one whose praises 

 are sounded in both hemispheres, who, moreover, is thoroughly acquainted 

 with Mr. Scudder's argument : " Is atrophy of legs a mark of develop- 

 ment?" and the answer came : "Atrophy is not a mark of development." 

 On that rock I stand. 



Mr. Scudder's hypothesis of the evolution of these families is obscure, 

 because the language used in different places conveys very different 

 meanings, and, anyway, the hypothesis is peculiar. In But., 244, we 

 read : " Doubtless the Skippers first separated from the common stock ; 

 the other families appear to have diverged simultaneously from each other 

 soon after their common separation from the Skippers ; " and a diagram 

 presented on page 246 is explained thus: "The position of the main 

 branches and their divisions is supposed to indicate the relative time at 

 which the groups diverged from each other, or from the main stem, and 

 the height which each branch attains the relative perfection of the highest 

 members of that groups' In accordance with the author's prepossessions, 

 the stem which is terminated by the Satyr ince is highest of all, in fact six 

 and a-half inches long, evidently limited only by the length of the printed 

 page, and goes straight up from the base (that is, from the " common 

 stock," while the Skippers diverge from the stem at half an inch from the 

 base, and the Papilionidee and Lycsenidse at another half inch simultane- 

 ously, one on one side of the stem, the other on other side. (That is, as 

 if from a setting of hens' eggs were to issue humming birds and eagles.) 



