89 



they were together — he never observed them crackling alone. 

 That was a curious thing. Then his correspondent said, " tell 

 me about their colours," and he wrote him about them, and he 

 observed that there was a tendency to albinism among the but- 

 terriies that flew in the shade under the cocoa trees and the 

 curious fact that so many happened to be of the colour of 

 chocolate. Probably that particular colour enabled them to 

 conceal themselves from their enemies. He also sent his cor- 

 respondent a tiny creamy butterfly with spots of metallic gold 

 upon it, as if a little piece of gold leaf had been placed upon it, 

 and he had written to ask him where did the ancestors of that 

 creatui'e of natural selection see a golden guinea-piece to enable 

 it to take that gold. The metallic green they saw on the 

 Urania had been laid down by recent scientists as being the last 

 and most perfect colour developed by natural selection, and in 

 writing to his correspondent he said " this gold beats your 

 green into fits ! " His correspondent had not yet answered that 

 question. But all these sorts of things were interesting, and it 

 was about them that they wanted to know. Of the caterpillars 

 and chrysalis he had not had much success in tracing the life 

 history out here. Perhaps his sight was not sufiiciently keen, 

 but he believed their President had succeeded in making a 

 drawing, showing the difterent stages and metamorphoses of a 

 number of Trinidad insects. But there were other things besides 

 insects, and he should like to say a word in favour of botany. 

 In regard to tliat he had been disajjpointed. He knew European 

 botany veiy fairly well, and even once, when a boy, found a 

 microscopic fungus which was new and got into Mr. Cooke's 

 book and he thought it was a great triumph ; but when he came 

 out here he thought it a great pity that persons whose lot was 

 cast out here had no means of learning the botany of the place. 

 There was no handbook, so far as he was aware, published in 

 Great Britain, within the ordinary means of a person, which 

 taught you even the natural orders of tropical botany, and he 

 thought it would be a very good thing for that institution— if 

 it could not be done at the Botanic Gardens — to institute a series 

 of lectures where they could learn the natural orders of the 

 trees out here. He was quite ashamed when people came out 

 from England and asked him the scientific name of some plant, 

 to find that he had never had the opportunity of studying it, 

 and unless you purchased a big book like Hooker's Genera 

 Plantarum there were practically no means of knowing it. Mr. 

 Devenish, for instance, might give them a lecture on the flower- 

 ing trees of Trinidad, and there should be classes at which 

 students could have flowering plants before them to dissect and 

 classify. He thought they ought to inform themselves a great 



