The Butterfly and Motli Family 57 



French, German, English, Italian or Russian 

 names, it would make everj^one angry who did not 

 speak that particular language as their native 

 tongue. 



But when it comes to Latin and Greek, these 

 languages are so dead that they are dried up 

 like Egyptian nmmmies and are only used by 

 scholars, priests and scientists, and from these 

 languages naturalists select their names for bugs, 

 butterflies and beetles, with no one but the 

 boy to object. Hence they call the moths and 

 butterflies Lepidoptera, making the word from 

 lepis, a scale, and pteron, a wing — in other words, a 

 scale-wing. 



If you will rub your finger-tips across the wing 

 of a butterfly or a moth, the relvety surface of the 

 wing will come off and stick to the ends of your 

 fingers, and when you examine this dust with a 

 powerful magnifying glass you will see that it is 

 composed of very small scales shaped like some of 

 those sho^vn in Fig. 46. 



The Scale-wings are divided into twQ families, 

 one known as the butterflies that fly by day and 

 the other as the butterflies that fly by night, or as 



