no THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



shine, a few grapes." The butterflies are of his kind. The high 

 mountain zone is for them a true ball-room ; the flowers are light 

 refreshments laid out in the vestibule. Their real business in life 

 is not to gorge and lay by, but to coquette and display themselves 

 and find fitting partners. 



So while the bees with their honey-bags, like the financier 

 with his money-bags, are storing up profit for the composite com- 

 munity, the butterfly, on the contrary, lays himself out for an 

 agreeable flutter, and sips nectar where he will, over large areas 

 of country. He flies rather high, flaunting his wings in the sun, 

 because he wants to show himself off in all his airy beauty ; and 

 when he spies a bed of bright flowers afar off on the sun-smitten 

 slopes, he sails off toward them lazily, like a grand signior who 

 amuses himself. No regular plodding through a monotonous 

 spike of plain little bells for him; what he wants is brilliant 

 color, bold advertisement, good honey, and plenty of it. He 

 doesn't care to search. Who wants his favors must make himself 

 conspicuous. 



Now, plants are good shopkeepers; they lay themselves out 

 strictly to attract their customers. Hence the character of the 

 flowers on this beeless belt of mountain-side is entirely determined 

 by the character of the butterfly fertilizers. Only those plants 

 which laid themselves out from time immemorial to suit the 

 butterflies, in other words, have succeeded in the long run in the 

 struggle for existence. So the butterfly-plants of the butterfly- 

 zone are all strictly adapted to butterfly tastes and butterfly fan- 

 cies. They are, for the most part, individually large and brill- 

 iantly colored ; they have lots of honey, often stored at the base 

 of a deep and open bell which the long proboscis of the insect 

 can easily penetrate ; and they habitually grow close together in 

 broad belts or patches, so that the color of each re-enforces and 

 aids the color of the others. It is this cumulative habit that ac- 

 counts for the marked flower-bed or jam-tart character which 

 everybody must have noticed in the high Alpine flora. 



Aristocracies usually pride themselves on their antiquity ; and 

 the high life of the mountains is undeniably ancient. The plants 

 and animals of the butterfly-zone belong to a special group which 

 appears everywhere in Europe and America about the limit of 

 snow, whether northward or upward. For example, I was pleased 

 to note near the summit of Mount Washington (the highest peak 

 in New Hampshire) that a large number of the flowers belonged 

 to species well known on the open plains of Lapland and Finland. 

 The plants of the High Alps are found also, as a rule, not only on 

 the High Pyrenees, the Carpathians, the Scotch Grampians, and 

 the Norwegian f jelds, but also round the Arctic Circle in Europe 

 and America. They reappear at long distances where suitable 



