65 



BUTTERFLIES IN NATURE AND IN BOOKS. 



Albert F. Winn, Westmount. 



It has been rather difficult to select a title suitable for a paper which 

 our President suggested that I should write for this meeting. His impres- 

 sion is, and I sincerely hope he is right, that there are a great many people 

 in this Province, as w'ell as elsewhere, who love our beautiful butterflies 

 and wish to learn their names and all about them, but do not know what 

 books to refer to in order to satisfy the desire for information. If this 

 paper should catch the eye of, and be of any assistance to, at least one 

 person its object will have been accomplished. 



Of late years all the efforts of our experts have resulted in educating 

 the public to the conviction that the only good insect is a dead insect 

 and that the whole race of creatures possessed of six legs should be promptly 

 dispatched according to the latest poisoning rules laid dow^n in the reports. 



We are not, or should not be, a Society for the Protection of Plants 

 composed of ruthless annihilators of insects, but of a body of students 

 aiming through a study of the marvellous relationships between plants 

 and insects, betw-een one insect and another insect, and between both 

 insects and plants and their respective fungous diseases, to find out 

 and publish the best means of enabling the agriculturalist and fruit-grower 

 to keep his or her pests within reasonable bounds and so produce crops 

 which are a credit alike to the grower and the Province. It should be 

 scarcely necessary to state here that no native insect has ever been, or is 

 ever likely to be completely wiped out by an intentional action of man. 

 This statement will perhaps be a relief to those who have eyes for the 

 beauties of Nature and see among all her marvellous productions the 

 many brilliantly coloured butterflies which flit from flower to flower and 

 have felt concerned lest they should all be destroyed on account of the 

 sins of a few more or less distant relations. There is only one truthful 

 answer possible to the question, "How can we exterminate an insect." 

 and that is, to destroy everything it feeds upon — which is certainly a case 

 of the "cure being worse than the disease." 



Of all the various orders of insects, the butterflies are undoubtedly 

 the most generally known by those who have eyes for the beauties of Na- 

 ture. There are certain insects, mosquitoes and black flies which also 

 attract much attention, but the usual feeling is for man to get as far from 

 them as possible. Everyone knows what a butterfly looks like. Most 



