394 THE BUTTERFLIES OF NEW ENGLAND. 



condition, was induced by him to depress and shut the wings successively, 

 and " each time she testily performed this action I heard distinctly, as the 

 fore wings were brought forward, when only the extreme l)a8al portion of 

 the wings was in contact, a sound soft and refreshing, like evening foot- 

 steps on the pavement, or grating sand-paper." The same thing has been 

 observed long since by the Rev. Mr. Green in the European Inachis io, 

 who accidentally disturbed a colony of hibernating butterflies and heard a 

 faint hissing noise issue from the cavity in which tliey were concealed, 

 while the wings were slowly depressed and elevated ; the noise resembled 

 ' ' that made by blowing slowly with moderate force through the closed 

 teeth." The late Mr. Hewitson of England also observed the same thing 

 in Inachis io, but compares the sound of the wings when rubbed together 

 to the friction of sand-paper. Mr. A. H. Jones (Ent. month, mag., 

 xiii : 208) noted the same thing in hibernating Euvanessa antiopa, wdiich 

 produced a grating sound, and I have myself not only heard this butter- 

 fly make the noise while fanning its wings as it rested upon a window sill, 

 but have artificially produced the same sound by rubbing the wings of a 

 dead specimen together. 



Other butterflies, but tropical species, are also stated to produce such 

 sounds. Thus Distant gives the observation of a Captain Godfery as 

 noticing that one of a pair of a species of Thaumantis (a genus allied to 

 the great blue Morphos of South America) , while flying around its mate 

 "produced a most curious crackling or rustling noise," which " was evi- 

 dently emitted at the creature's will and was distinctly audible within two 

 or three yards of the insect" (Rhop. Malay., 426-27). Fritz Miiller, 

 who adds his testimony to the clicking sound emitted by Ageronia, states 

 that quite another butterfly, a species of Eunica, equally produces the 

 noise, and he also heard a sound, even louder than that made by Ageronia, 

 " produced by two small brown butterflies which I did not succeed in 

 catching." 



The sounds made by butterflies of the temperate zone and compared by 

 nearly all observers to that of the abrasion of one rough surface upon an- 

 other, more or less faint, would hardly seem at first sight to be entirely 

 analogous to the clicking sounds made by their more noisy brethren of the 

 tropics ; but no organs can be found in the one which do not exist in the 

 other. Now experiments made after death upon Polygonia faunus show 

 that they must be capable of producing the same sounds as Euvanessa 

 antiopa ; and in this connection, an instance which occurred to me last 

 summer on the top of ^Nlount Washington has a direct bearing ; for while 

 walking on the carriage road, I started up a pair unobserved just at my 

 feet. I instantly stopped motionless to see whether they would settle 

 again, when one of them, which had flown to a short distance, turned and 

 flew rapidly back straight at my face, turning only when within three or 



