138 London Insects. 



later, it weighs from 120 to 140 grains. Take only 

 the lowest weight, 120 grains, it is very nearly 

 10,000 times as great as the weight on leaving 

 the egg ! Apply this to a baby of say 10 Ibs. a 

 good big child, but nothing extraordinary and we 

 have a very simple sum : 10 Ibs x 10,000 = 100,000 

 Ibs., something over 40 tons. And all in one month ! 

 The weight of Jumbo when he left England was 

 estimated at something like 7 tons. 



But we have strayed from the two-wings to the 

 fairy land of insects, the country of the Lepidoptera 

 Butterflies and Moths. 



A glorious " Red Admiral " was sunning himself 

 outside Buckingham Palace on the i/th September, 

 1883, shaking the creases out of a very perfect uniform 

 black, white, and scarlet evidently just out of the 

 packing case. But we have not often, at least in the 

 central parks or squares, any great number of the 

 brighter-coloured Butterflies, though in London, as 

 elsewhere, the common White Cabbage Butterflies are 

 plentiful. We have become, happily, as a nation, much 

 more tender-hearted than we were in the days of bull- 

 baiting and cock-fighting, and are setting our minds 

 in earnest now against cruelty of every kind. But 

 without necessarily going quite so far as Christopher 

 North, who argued that to give up fox-hunting would be 

 to rob the poor fox of all that made life worth living ; 

 the healthy tingle in every limb as he pulls himself 

 together for a start as the hounds are thrown in, 

 the mad excitement of the first mile's spin across the 

 open, with the pack at his tail the fun of fooling the 

 huntsman and telling the vixen at home all about it 

 over a good fat hen in the evening : ; without going 

 quite so far as this, the man must have forgotten his 

 own boyish delights, who can see without any pleasure 



