108 THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 



here in the spring seem to be in rather too good a condition to have made the 

 journey. On the other hand no specimens have been found in this vicinity 

 in the winter and as adults are fairly common in May, it is just as hard to 

 believe that they did not come up from the South. 



Long flights of butterflies and moths are not rare. One of the longest 

 was put on record by Frederic A. Lucas in 1887 when he saw many Lepidop- 

 tera, chiefly moths, one thousand miles off the coast of Brazil. Such flights 

 however are not migrations in the true sense. These insects had doubtless 

 been blown out of sight of land and had simply kept on flying because of 

 necessity. 



The migratory locust is not a similar case for it moves in swarms only 

 when the birth rate has been so large that the local food supply is ex- 

 hausted. The adult monarchs are certainly not hard put to it for food as 

 not only are flowers abundant when the migration starts but also adult 

 butterflies take but little nourishment at any tune. The so-called migra- 

 tion of the maggots of certain fungus-gnats (Sciara sp.) is, naturally, ex- 

 tremely limited and would not be noticed were it not that they are 

 gregarious in habits. This too, is a movement in search of food. The 

 swarming and migration of the monarch ^ remain a mystery in spite of the 

 fact that they occur all aboiit us every year. 



Possibly it is on accoiuit of these roaming habits, possibly it is also on 

 account of its protection from birds, that the monarch butterfly is now 

 spreading over the entire earth. It has found its way to Australia, Java, 

 Sumatra and the Philippines. A few specimens are found every year in 

 Great Britain where the entomologist's net is an enemy not to be daunted 

 by gaudy color and acrid taste. It is well established at the Cape Verde 

 Islands and will without doubt shortly have conquered the earth. 



I ^Vhat is one of the most interesting, perhaps the most astounding and certainly the most 

 inexpensive group for its size ever i)repared in tlie American IMtiseum lias newly made its 

 appearance in the hall of insect biology. It shows a three-foot sqtiare of groimd on which 

 grows a small white oak tree and the season is early atitumn as annotmced by a few sprigs 

 of white aster. The astoimding sight is the presence of some five lumdred of one of our 

 largest North American btitterflies clinging everywhere to leaves and twigs. This five 

 hundred is reported by those who have witnessed the swarming and what seems to be the 

 migration of the monarch butterfly to be a very small part indeed of the niunbers that 

 actually come together. They gather from miles about. Fifty or more can be caught 

 by one sweep of a small net over the leaves where they rest, while those not captured but 

 dislodged by the mov(unent of the net are for niunber like a storm of fulling leaves as they 

 flutter and poise to s(>tlle lightly back on the tree. Tall slender sprays of goldenrod and aster, 

 gradually hidden luider burdens of folding and imfolding brown wings, finally bend to the 

 ground under the weight — a fact by the way that gives a vivid idea of numbers, for weight 

 effective in any degree is not associated in our minds with butterflies. In the swarming at 

 Clinton, but a stone's throw from the sea beach, the butterflies gathered on the oaks and 

 hickories to a height of twenty-flve or thirty feet, on the sheltered sunny side of the grove. 

 They were there one day and gone the next, following the coast southward. — Editor. 



