PREHISTORIC BOTANISTS. ^3 



I ever again look upon the folded wings of the Progne or Faun us 

 butterfly without a consciousness that I now see " through and 

 beyond" where before I had only looked upon its scales? 



Not the least among the pleasant episodes of a recent Euro- 

 pean trip was the continual recurrence of this familiar compan- 

 ion, the antiopa. In the lanes of Cheshire though I learn the 

 insect is here a rare visitor I was fortunate enough to find him ; 

 among the dikes of Holland I saw him, and even among the 

 mountain crags of Switzerland, hovering high aloft in buoyant 

 flight above the sea of ice, as though with heart set upon the 

 cloud -veiled pinnacle. How irresistibly, then, do I return to my 

 introductory picture of the snow upon the shingles ! What remi- 

 niscent innate dreams of eons past were compassed in the flight 

 of that brown sylph above the mimic glacial fields upon the roof! 

 for the antiopa of to-day but links the present with the prime- 

 val past. Then, as now, our Angle-wings revelled in the boreal 

 clime, hibernating in rocky fissures, and sipping the sweets from 

 the fringe of blossoms at the skirts of the glacial fields, its pres- 

 ent welcome for the cold being but an inheritance from its sturdy 

 ancestry. 



It has long been my intention to gather together my obser- 

 vations touching a certain phase of insect life of singular inter- 

 est, and one not sufficiently dwelt upon, it seems to me, in the 

 literature of natural history. I refer to the strange innate bo- 

 tanical instinct possessed by a large number of insects, notably 

 of the lepidopterous tribe, which, with the exception of the bees, 

 are most intimately associated with the floral kingdom. For the 

 " idle butterfly " of the poet 



" The sportive rover of the meadows, 

 Kissing all buds that are pretty and sweet," 



the universal type of dolce far niente under the v guide of en- 

 lightened science now rebukes the heedless estimate of the past, 

 proving its buoyant rounds to have been directed by a divine 

 purpose, concerned in the perpetuation of many of the very 



