54 AUTUMN AND WINTER 



widespread and hardy butterfly, as well as a very lively and 

 beautiful one ; it scours the Lake Mountains as high as the 

 cloudy hollows where the mountain ringlets breed, and its 

 spiny caterpillars can be seen on the nettles by the doors 

 of the highest Alpine chalets. In England it is one of the 

 last butterflies to decline seriously in numbers in a series of 

 wet, cold years ; and after a fine summer it often abounds by 

 September. This is due to the fact that it normally has 

 two broods, while the other species of its family have 

 usually only one. The first brood emerges early in the 

 summer, and lays the eggs of a second, which hatches 

 towards the end of August ; and if both these broods prosper, 

 there is an enormous multiplication of the numbers of the 

 species between the reappearance of the hibernated insects 

 in March, and the hatching of the second brood in late 

 summer. 



The peacock butterfly is a larger and statelier insect, 

 with all four wings boldly marked with the striking peacock- 

 eye pattern which recurs so frequently in Nature as in the 

 peacock, the argus pheasant, and the eye-spots on a leopard's 

 skin. It is interesting to compare the peacock butterfly with 

 the small tortoiseshell, and to see how the pattern of the 

 tortoiseshell seems to be leading up to the perfect eye-spots 

 of the peacock. The upper wings of both have very similar 

 spots of brown and yellow and blue on a deep red ground ; 

 but the tortoiseshell just misses the eyelike pattern, while 

 its lower wings, though brighter than those of the peacock, 

 show no approximation to it. Such eyelike spots are some- 

 times said to be protective ; they are supposed to scare away 

 the enemies of the insect which bears them by their appear- 

 ance of being the eye of some large creature. In certain 

 cases they may very possibly have such an effect ; we shall 

 notice the case of the elephant hawk caterpillar a little later, 



