2 BRITISH BUTTERFLIES. 



It is clearly therefore not so superfluous as it might 

 at first otherwise seem, to commence the subject by 

 defining even such a familiar 'object as a butterfly, and 

 more especially distinguishing it with certainty from a 

 moth, the only other creature with which it can well bo 

 confounded. 



The usual notion of a butterfly is of a gay fluttering 

 thing, whose broad painted wings are covered with a 

 mealy stuff that comes off with handling. This is aU 

 very well for a general idea, but the characters that 

 form it are common to some other insects besides but- 

 terflies. Moths and hawk-moths have mealy wings / 

 and are often gaily coloured too \ whilst, 011 the ethei 

 hand, some butterflies are as dusky and plain as pos- 

 sible. Thus the crimson-winged Tiger, and Cinnabar 

 moths get the name of butterflies, and the Meadow 

 brown butterfly is as sure to be called a moth. So, as 

 neither colouring nor mealy wings furnish us with the 

 required definition, we must find some concise combina- 

 tion of characters that will answer the purpose. But* 

 terflies, then, are insects with mealy wings, and whose 

 horns (called "antenna?") have a clubbed or thickened 

 tip, giving them more or less resemblance to a drum-stick. 

 So the difference in the shape of the antennae is the 

 chief outward mark of distinction between butterflies 

 and moths, the latter having antennae of various -shapes, 

 threadlike or featherlike, but never clubbed at the tip. 



Having thus settled how a butterfly is to be recog- 

 nized at sight, let urs see what butterfly life is ; how 



