Effect of offering Insects^ Larvae, and PupcB to Birds. 463 



LIX. — Notes made during the Summer of 1887 on the Effect 

 of offering various Insects, Larvm, and Pupce to Birds. Bj 

 Arthur G. Butler, F.L.S., F.Z.S., &c. 



A FEW weeks ago I received an envelope by post containing 

 all the letters and notes which I sent to Mr. Poulton in 1887. 

 Nowordof explanation accompanied this missive; and although 

 such an action appeared hardly in accordance with my, perhaps 

 strained, ideas of strict courtesy, I could not but presume that 

 the envelope must have been forwarded by Mr. Poulton. 



That the short communication which I published in the 

 ' Annals ' for August should be assumed to be intended for 

 a personal attack upon Mr. Poulton never entered my head ; 

 indeed, I supposed that he, in common with all who deliglit 

 in the study of natural history, would have welcomed any 

 facts, even though apparently adverse to a pet theory, which 

 tended to throw light upon a subject which he had long and 

 eagerly studied 



Few things ever astonished me more than the hostile atti- 

 tude which JMr. Poulton assumed with regard to that innocent 

 paper, or the cruel misconstructions which he put upon the 

 most harmless remarks made therein ; that my comment 

 touching the repeated reproduction of a few comparatively 

 unimportant observations of my own should have been dislo- 

 cated into a .claim to the origination of Wallace^s theory is 

 too absurd to be considered seriously. In spite of my much- 

 valued friend Mr. Weir's careful experiments, as also those of 

 Messrs. Fritz Mliller, Weismann, and Poukon, I still insist 

 that, so long as a few desultory observations are incessantly 

 forced into a front place, it is an evidence of how little has 

 liitherto been done, upon which to establish the truth of a 

 theory ; many more observers are wanted, and all their obser- 

 vations must be im'partially treated if we are to arrive at 

 exact scientific truth. 



1 was not a\vare that Mr. Poulton had made a selection of 

 " the most Interesting results " of my recent experiments for 

 publication in the Report of the British Association, or I 

 should not have said " so far nothing seems to have come of 

 It ; '" nevertheless, as it is impossible for any one man to 

 judge how far even apparently v^ninteresting• results may 

 eventually tell for or against a theory — as, too, Mr. Poulton 

 has evidently forgotten some of those facts when he comments 

 upon Zeuzera cesculi and the size of the spiders offered to 



