4 BRITISH BUTTERFLIES. 



looking plant, is of the same genus, and shares the 

 same properties. She evidently works out the natural 

 system of botany, and might have been a pupil of 

 Jussieu, had she not been tutored by a far higher 

 AUTHORITY. 



This display of instinct would seem far less wonderful 

 did the mother butterfly herself feed on the plant she 

 commits her eggs to. In that case, her choice might 

 have appeared as the result of personal experience of 

 some peculiar benefit or pleasure derived from the plant, 

 and then this sentiment might have become hereditary ; 

 just as, for example, the acquired taste for game is 

 hereditary with sporting dogs. Whereas the fact is, 

 that a butterfly only occasionally, and as a matter of 

 accident rather than rule, derives her own nectareous 

 food from the flowers of the plant, whose leaves nourish 

 her caterpillar progeny. So that this, as well as num- 

 berless other phenomena of instinct, remains a mystery 

 to be admired, but not explained by any ordinary rule 

 of cause and effect. 



Having thus efficiently provided, as far as board and 

 lodging are concerned, for the welfare of the future 

 brood, the mother seems to consider them settled for 

 life, takes no further care of them, nor even awaits the 

 opening of the sculptured caskets that contain their 

 tiny life-germs ; but, trusting them to the sun's warmth 

 for their hatching, and then to their own hungry little 

 instincts to teach them good use of the food placed 

 within their reach, she sees them no more. 



But though abandoning her offspring to fate in this 

 manner, it must not be imagined that the butterfly 

 mother takes her pattern of maternity from certain 

 human mothers, and in a round of " butterfly's balls," 

 and such like dissipations, forgets the sacred claims of 

 the nursery. No, she has far other and better excuses 

 for absenting herself from her family ; one of which is, 

 that she usually dies before the latter are hatched ; and 

 if that is not enough, that the young can get on quite 

 as well without her ; for probably she could not teach 



