302 FRANCIS ORPEN MORRIS 



One of the last papers written by my father. was 

 one on " Mimicry," which appeared in the pages of 

 the Field Club y a magazine afterwards merged with 

 Nature Notes. Though admitting that there was 

 just a substratum of truth in the idea, he did not, 

 as it may well be supposed, hold with the general 

 conclusions of the theory. "No doubt," he said, 

 "very many insects closely resemble the objects 

 on which they are wont to repose ; but if it is by 

 this likeness that they have been preserved, how 

 has it come to pass that a vastly greater number of 

 others, which are as unlike their loca standi as the 

 former are like them, have survived, and far more 

 numerously, both specifically and individually, as 

 we can see for ourselves every day ? How was it 

 that the unfavoured ones have not been long since 

 exterminated, as Darwin says it was their fate to 

 have been, on his theory ? " As to the idea that 

 birds generally will not attack and devour butter- 

 flies owing to a scent which is distasteful to them, 

 Mr. Morris suggested what seemed to him a more 

 probable and common-sense explanation, namely, 

 that the birds are not tempted to feed on butterflies 

 owing to the large and tasteless wings of the insects 

 surrounding, as he expressed it, "such very small 

 morsels as their bodies to reward their capture a 

 halfpenny worth of bread to such an intolerable 

 amount of parchment." 



