OF BUTTERFLIES 61 



general that almost any meaning can be drawn from 

 them by dilettanteism if only sufficient ingenuity 

 is put in. An English writer, Sara Coleridge, has 

 strenuously upheld the idea that a butterfly was 

 simply a hetter sort of fly, laughing to scorn the 

 common notion, which seems to me, as I think it 

 must to all entomologists, to be unquestionably the 

 correct one, that the word is simply an expressive 

 name given to the commonest form of butterfly 

 that is found in Europe, where the name arose, 

 namely, the butterflies of the genus Eurymus, 

 which are ordinarily of much the same kind of yel- 

 low that one finds on the buttercup, whence the 

 name of both. One feels the greater confidence 

 in this because the term is applied in so many dif- 

 ferent languages in much the same way. In Anglo- 

 Saxon, it is buttor-fleoge, which is simply butterfly ; 

 while some of the variations of this term in other 

 languages are the Dutch botervlieg, earlier boter- 

 vlieghe, the German butterfliege, and the earlier 

 German form, buttervogel.^ Other variations of 

 the same name appear in the poetical quotations 



^ Compare our own lady&tVc? for Coccinella, as in the com- 

 mon distich, which ran differently in my childhood from 

 what is set down in the books. 1 was taught to say : — 



" Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home, 

 Your house is on fire aud your children will roam." 



