CHAPTER XIV 

 THE MOTHS AND BUTTERFLIES (Order Lepidoptera) 



OTHS and butterflies are the insects most 

 favored of collectors and nature lovers; a 

 German amateur would call them the "Lieb- 

 lings-insekten." The beautiful color patterns, 

 the graceful flight and dainty flower-haunting habits, and the interesting 

 metamorphosis in their life-history make them very attractive, while the com- 

 parative ease with which the various species may be determined, and the 

 large number of popular as well as more technical accounts of their life 

 which are accessible for information, render the moths and butterflies most 

 available, among all the insects, for systematic collecting and study by 

 amateurs. 



Despite the large number of species in the order (6622 are recorded in 

 the latest catalogue of the North American forms) and the great variety in 

 size and pattern, the order is an unusually homogeneous one, even a begin- 

 ning student rarely mistaking a moth for an insect of any other order, or 

 classifying a non-lepidopterous insect in this order. A few aberrant species 

 are wingless (females only) and a few (certain " clear- winged " species) have 

 a superficial likeness to wasps and bumblebees, but the general habitus of 

 any Lepidopteron, let alone the readily determinable and absolutely diag- 

 nostic character of the scale-covering on the wings, usually indicates unmis- 

 takably the affinities of any moth or butterfly. 



The diagnostic structural characters are the (already mentioned) pres- 

 ence on upper and lower sides of both wings (as well as over the surface of 

 the body) of a covering of small symmetrically formed scales, which are 

 modified hairs, and to which all of the color and pattern of the insects are 

 due. In Chapter XVII will be found a detailed account of these scales, 

 explaining their structure, their origin, and how they produce the color pat- 

 terns. The wings themselves are almost always present (in two pairs), the 

 fore wings larger than the hind wings, and with a characteristic venation, 

 in which the modifications, though small, are yet so constant and definite 

 that they are used successfully as the principal basis for the classification 

 of the order into families. Another characteristic is the highly modified 

 and peculiar condition of the mouth-parts. While in some species the mouth- 

 parts are rudimentary (atrophied) and evidently not functional, in most 

 there is a well-developed slender flexible sucking proboscis (Fig. 509) com- 



358 



