buttp:rflies at night and at sea. 377 



There are, however, exceptions to nearly every general rule, and a few of 

 them may be related here. 



About fifteen years ago, I was spending the summer on the island of 

 Nantucket. The under keeper of the powerful flash light at Sankaty 

 Head brought me one day a tin box full of ' " moths ' ' which had been 

 fluttering around his lantern in great swarms the night previous. On 

 0})ening it, 1 discovered a dozen living specimens of Eugonia j-album. 

 Hundreds of them had flown into the lantern the i)receding night, and had 

 given him a great deal of trouble. This is the first instance, so far as I 

 can learn, in which butterflies have been known to fly by night, and it was 

 the more surprising because this butterfly had never before and has never 

 since been found by me upon the island of Nantucket. Nor do I think 

 there are enough plants there upon which its caterpillars would be likely to 

 feed to support any considerable brood. Since then. Miss Murtfeldt of 

 Missouri has stated (Psyche iv : 206) that after ten o'clock one August 

 evening a specimen of Doxocopa celtis entered the open window of her 

 sitting room attracted by the light and was captured in a butterfy net. 

 Another specimen was taken earlier in the evening but after the lamps 

 were lighted. A hackberry tree, Celtis, on which the larva feeds, was 

 near the window. An instance still more nearly approaching the first is 

 stated to have been mentioned at a meeting of the Brooklyn Entomological 

 Society in October, 1885 ; Dr. C. Hart Merriam was quoted as having 

 mentioned that a light-house keeper on Lake Ontario had been greatly 

 annoyed by the large swarms of Anosia plexippus that flew against it and 

 obscured the light. These are the only instances that I have been able 

 to find, either in this country or elsewhere, of the attraction of butterflies 

 to ordinary light ; but since the introduction of electric lights into our 

 cities, entomologists have made use of them for the capture of insects, 

 many nocturnal animals being attracted from all the surrounding countrv 

 by the brilliancy of the light, and among them, according to Mr. Henrv 

 Edwards and others, several species of butterflies (Ent. amer., i: 160). 

 Most of them, like the preceding, were members of the highest familv, 

 Nymphalidae, viz., Anosia plexippus, Vanessa atalanta, V. cardui, V. 

 huntera, and Euvanessa antiopa ; and, besides these, Cyaniris pseudargio- 

 lus and Euphoeades troilus. As all these instances, excepting that men- 

 tioned by Miss Murtfeldt, were cases of exceptional brilliancy and 

 magnitude in the light, it is hardly to be presumed that we shall change 

 our opinion that butterflies, as a rule, are insects of the day, although, as 

 is well known, there are certain groups, especially of the Satyrinae, which 

 in the tropics are accustomed to fly by twilight and even in the rain. 



My attention was early called to the occurrence of buttei-flies far out at 

 sea by seeing, on my first natural history expedition over thirty years ago, 

 a specimen of Euvanessa antiopa, which visited our vessel on the 26th of 



