168 THE COLOUES OF ANIMALS 



I never heard anything more ingenious than your 

 suggestion, and I hope you may be able to prove it 

 true. That is a splendid fact about the white moths ; 

 it warms one's very blood to see a theory thus almost 

 proved to be true.'^ 



Very soon after the suggestion was made public "^ 

 it received confirmation by experiments conducted by 

 Mr. J. Jenner Weir ^ and Mr. A. G. Butler.'' At a 

 later date experiments of the same kind were made by 

 Professor Weismann,^ and still later by myself.^ It 

 was found that while birds devoured with eagerness 

 the well-concealed caterpillars, they refused those 

 with conspicuous colours; it was also found that 

 other insect-eating animals, such as frogs, Hzards, 

 and spiders, refused larvae with warning colours, or 

 did so after first tasting them. 



Examples of Warning Colours among Caterpillars 



A very common example of a caterpillar with 

 warning colours is afforded by the larva of the Cur- 

 rant Moth or Magpie Moth {Abraxas grossidariata), 

 which is excessively abundant in gardens (see fig. 43) 



' Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, 1887, vol. iii. p. 94. 

 2 Proc. Ent. Soc. Lond. Ser. 3, v. p. Ixxx. 1867. 

 ' Trans. Ent. Soc. Lond. 1869, Part i. April. 



* Ibid. p. 27. 



* Studies in the Theory of Desce7it, Part ii. pp. 336-340. English 

 translation by Professor E. Meldola. 



^ Proc. Zool. Soc. 1887, p. 191. This paper contains an account 

 of all previous work on the same subject. 



