EDITORIAL 269 



some suburban village of the great city where to her delight she 

 found a garden with a cabbage growing in it. These two butter- 

 flies through accepting conditions as they found them and making 

 the best of things went to work with a will to lay eggs and thus 

 colonize the new world with their progeny. These were small 

 beginnings but scarcely a quarter of a century had clasped, before 

 the descendants of these stowaways had captured and called their 

 own e\^ery cabbage patch from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from 

 the Gulf of Mexico to Hudson Bay and not a shot had been fired. 



America once had some cabbage butterflies of her own which had 

 fed on wild cruciferous 'plants for peaceful eons before Columbus 

 discovered their country. When civilization came and brought 

 fields of cabbage — these native aboriginal butterflies found this 

 new food plant to their taste and came out of the wilderness and 

 lived in gardens. But there was a certain consideration and deli- 

 cacy in their depredations for they fed only on the outside leaves of 

 cabbage leaving the solid head of this stimulating and odoriferous 

 A^egetable for the nourishment and delectation of the rightful 

 owners. No such regard for the rights of man characterized the 

 European invaders whose caterpillars dug and still dig their peace- 

 ful but odious trenches through and through the cabbage heads 

 that belong to the rightful occupants of the country. 



There is a vast, unwritten, unrecorded history of what happened 

 to our polite native cabbage butterflies when these hordes of silent 

 unmilitary invaders appeared. Did they intermarry with them and 

 thus become absorbed in the dominant race? Or did they flee to 

 the woods and to the wild crucifers of their ancestors — now covering 

 less area because of cultivation and there silently starve and then 

 become blotted out ? No one knows ! All that we do know is that 

 while formerly the "checkered white" and "gray veined white" 

 butterflies were comm.on they are now seen but rarely. Mean- 

 while no country ever conquered and overrun by Roman Legions 

 was ever more in the grip of the talons of the Roman Eagles than 

 is North America to-day in the grip of the six tiny claws of this 

 butterfly invader, Pieris rapcB. 



