WHY BUTTERFLY AND SUN? 



villagers still name it prefers sunlessness ; though 

 there are exceptions ; take the burnet, cinnabar, 

 humming-bird hawk moth, and gamma, which fly in 

 sun. Mother Shipton, the little patterned moth, 

 which I noticed the other day in a swamp in the 

 forest, is also a day-flyer. But the difference, if it 

 exists, in the constitution of moths that fly in the 

 sun and moths that sleep in the sun, has not been 

 stated. The coma of some butterflies on a sunless 

 summer day is, I believe, identical with the coma of 

 the night-flying moth during the day. Hibernation, 

 save in name, probably covers the whole coma state 

 in all animals. The common blue butterfly is so 

 overcome by rough weather that we can pick it off 

 the flowering grass head to which it anchors itself. 

 Many other butterflies are quite as drowsy. Intense 

 cold sends a man to sleep, the fatal merciful sleep 

 from which there is no awaking. Thus, perhaps, 

 some of the ice-bound mariners of Franklin and, 

 long before Franklin, of brave Willoughby ended. 

 A butterfly can live through intenser cold than a 

 man. Yet, in even slight cold, it cannot live its full 

 life as a man can. 



The sun goes behind a heavy bank of cloud, the 

 thermometer falls a very little for a short time the 

 butterfly which, out-of-doors, safely slept through 

 the hardest winter, only half lives. It is numbed, 

 powerless to escape a foe from whom, five minutes 

 before, it soared with lively sense of danger. The 

 sun comes out again, the butterfly is instantly itself, 

 alert to see and shun a foe, burning to battle with a 



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