BRITISH BUTTERFLIES 
AND 
THEIR TRANSFORMATIONS. 
ORDER LEPIDOPTERA. 
Tue beautiful tribes of Butterflies and Moths constitute one of the primary divisions or orders of winged 
insects, and are easily distinguished by several characters not found in any other annulose animals. 
The wings, four in number, are of a membranous texture, covered on both sides with innumerable minute 
scales, resting upon each other like the tiles of a roof, and easily removed. It is to these scales that the insects 
are indebted for their splendid colours, the membrane of the wing itself being colourless. 
The head is free,—that is, not received in a frontal cavity of the thorax,—and is furnished on each side with a 
large compound eye, and above with a pair of elongated antennze, variable in form, not only in the different species, 
but also often in the sexes of the same species, and which in the butterflies are almost always terminated by a 
club. The mouth occupies the lower part of the face, and appears at first sight to consist only of a long tongue, 
which the insect folds and unfolds in a spiral manner at will, and of a pair of scaly or hairy appendages, serving 
as a defence to the spiral apparatus when coiled up ; but a more minute examination shows that the mouth is 
much more complicated in its structure, and that it exhibits all the parts (although sometimes in a rudimental 
state) of the mouth of the biting insects. In fact, by denuding the front of the head of its scales, two minute 
triangular pieces are observed at a small distance apart above the origin of the spiral instrument, and which are 
the rudimental mandibles, here apparently useless, as is also the small conical upper lip placed between these two 
rudimental jaws, below which on each side is an oval plate soldered to the head, from the upper part of which 
arises one of the lateral halves of the spiral part, which in effect is composed of the two lower jaws extraordinarily 
elongated, and applied together so as to form a sucking tube ; at the base of each portion of this tube is a minute 
tubercle, which in some species is developed into an elongated pair of feelers, or maxillary palpi; the labial 
palpi being the large feelers between which the spiral maxille are placed when at rest, and arising from the 
sides of the lower lip, which, like the basal part of the maxilla, is soldered to the head. 
The transformations of these insects, which have attracted the attention of the most incurious observer from 
the earliest period, also serve to distinguish them from all other insects. The females deposit a considerable 
number of eggs, from which are hatched small worm-like jointed animals, furnished with a scaly head armed 
with a mouth and powerful jaws; six short scaly legs, attached in pairs to the three segments succeeding the 
head, and a variable number of short thick fleshy legs attached in pairs to the posterior segments of the body. 
