60 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 



sight did not prevent his being constantly deceived by it when 

 out collecting. He observed that the conspicuous and slow- 

 flying Heliconidse were not pursued by any of the ordinary 

 enemies of insects to which they would have fallen easy prey, 

 and suggested the reason for this security in the peculiar smell 

 which they emitted. Demonstrating the identity in kind of these 

 most striking mimicries with the protective resemblances to 

 vegetable and inorganic forms so widely prevalent in Nature, he 

 traced them all to the operation of " natural selection," the 

 agents being none other than " insectivorous animals," which 

 gradually destroy all the individuals of mimicking species least 

 resembling those which are exempt from persecution. 



Mr. Bates gives a list of no fewer than thirty-six cases of 

 mimicry known to occur among the butterflies and moths of 

 Tropical America. In one of these six species (three butterflies 

 belonging to two families, and three ' moths belonging to two 

 families) imitate one and the same Heliconide species, viz., 

 Methona psidii ; and in another, four butterflies (of three difi'erent 

 families) and a moth all copy Ithomia flora. The imitations of 

 species of Ithomia, Mechanitis, and Methona, Heliconide genera, 

 by species of Leptalis, a genus of Pierinse, or " white " butterflies, 

 are so surprisingly perfect that nobody who has seen the insects 

 concerned, or even the figures of them illustrating Mr. Bates's 

 paper, can wonder at their deceiving on the wing the most 

 experienced collector. 



The view propounded by Mr. Bates received most weighty 

 confirmation at the hands of Mr. A. R. Wallace, who, in his 

 interesting paper on the Papilionidse of the Malayan Region 

 (read to the Linnean Society in 1864), called attention to the 

 occurrence of a quite similar series of mimicries in India and the 

 Eastern Archipelago, and unreservedly expressed his entire 

 concurrence in the explanation given of the causes at work in 

 the production of them. Mr. Wallace pointed out that, as in 

 America, so in the Old World, it is butterflies of the Danaid 

 group that are most often the objects of imitation by those of 

 other families, and gave a list of fifteen of the best-marked cases 

 known among the Papilionidse alone. The first of these may be 

 noted as peculiarly interesting, seeing that the male and female 

 of the mimickers, Papilio paradoxa, difl'er considerably, and that 

 each mimics the corresponding sex of Euplcea midamus. In 



