2 BRITISH BUTTERFLIES. 



The usual notion of a butterfly is of a gay fluttering 

 thing, whose broad painted wings are covered with a 

 mealy stuff that conies off with handling. This is all 

 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, on the other 

 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 us see what butterfly life is ; how 

 the creature lives, and has lived, in the stages preceding 

 its present airy form. 



In like manner with other insects, all butterflies com- 

 mence their existence enclosed in minute eggs; and these 

 eggs, as if shadowing forth the beauty yet undeveloped 

 whose germ they contain, are themselves such curi- 

 ously beautiful objects, that they must not be passed 

 over without admiring notice. It seems, indeeol, as if 

 nature determined that the ornamental character of the 

 butterfly should commence with its earliest stage ; 

 form, and not colour, being employed in its decoration, 

 sculpture being here made the forerunner of painting. 



Some of these forms are roughly shown on Plate II. 

 (figs. 1 7), but highly magnified; for as these eggs 

 are really very tiny structures, such as would fall easily 

 through a pin-hole, the aid of a microscope is of course 



