12 INSECT MISCELLANIES. 



and grasping it in various directions and positions. 

 In a word, instead of being, as most people suppose, 

 engaged in an idle and unprofitable amusement, the 

 infant is employed in eager study and examination, 

 in order to learn the effects of the qualities of objects 

 upon its senses. The insects, on the other hand, are 

 too short-lived to require the same multifarious know- 

 ledge of hardness, softness, distance, and form, and 

 hence they only employ their palpi in examining 

 what may he proper or improper for food. 



An important organ of touch in insects, as it 

 appears to us, has been altogether overlooked by 

 naturalists. We refer to the surface of the wings, 

 minutely furnished, as they appear to be, with nerves 

 for this express purpose. It must be this, indeed, 

 which, in a great measure, serves to direct their 

 flight, as the focus of their eyes appears, according 

 to our ideas of senses, to be too short for this pur- 

 pose. We have elsewhere remarked, that the marsh 

 fritillary butterfly {MilitcBa Jlrtemis, Ochsenh.) 

 seldom flies beyond the field in which it is pro- 

 duced \* but this is not so remarkable in insects 

 of slow and heavy flight, and in a field hedged in, 

 as in those of rapid flight and restless disposition, 

 in the open country. We remarked, for several weeks, 

 near St Adresse, in Normandy, a very limited spot, 

 close by the sea, to be daily frequented by about half a 

 dozen of the clouded yellow butterfly ( Colias Edusa, 

 Stephens), which seemed to make a regular circuit, 

 and return again, altogether independent of the direc- 

 tion of the wind, against which they often made way. 

 Now, as they often rose to so considerable a height 

 that they must have lost sight of the ground, we con- 

 clude that they guided their flight more by the weight 

 of the superincumbent air than by the direction of 

 the wind — an inference rendered more probable by 



* See Chapter on Migrations. 



