I4 8 STARLIGHT AND SUNSHINE. 



Thus once more led to the snows, I am reminded of a boreal 

 recluse which I had almost forgotten, and with which I may fit- 

 tingly bring my rambling essay to a close. Here, among the 

 Alpen peaks of our own country, we may learn a lesson from 

 antiquity, in the example if not of the most beautiful, certainly 

 in many respects the most interesting, butterfly among its tribe. 

 Much has been written concerning this strange lover of the cold. 

 I will quote a recent reference of Grant Allen: 



" On and near the summit of Mount Washington a small community of butter- 

 flies, belonging to an old glacial and arctic species, still lingers over a very small 

 area where it has held its own for the eighty thousand years that have elapsed 

 since the termination of the great ice age. The actual summit of the mountain 

 rises to a height of 6293 feet ; and the butterflies do not range lower than the 5000 

 feet line. . . . Again, from Mount Washington to Long's Peak in Colorado the dis- 

 tance amounts to 1800 miles, while from the White Mountains to Hopedale in Lab- 

 rador, where the same butterflies first appear, makes a bee-line of fully a thousand 

 miles. In the intervening districts there are no insects of the same species. 

 Hence we must conclude that a few butterflies left behind in the retreating main 

 guard of their race on that one New Hampshire peak have gone on for thousands 

 and thousands of years producing eggs, and growing from caterpillars into full- 

 fledged insects without once effecting a cross with the remainder of their conge- 

 ners among the snows of the Rocky Mountains, or in the chilly plains of sub- 

 arctic America. So far as they themselves know, they are the only representatives 

 of their kind now remaining on the whole earth, left behind like the ark on Ararat 

 amid the helpless ruins of an antediluvian world." 



For 200,000 years, according to geological data, these boreal 

 broods must have wooed the frozen seas, driven southward by the 

 overwhelming ice, companions of the verdant fringe of the vast 

 glacier, following in its retreat, at length beguiled by remnant ice- 

 fields lodged in the " great gulfs " of the Presidential range, and 

 at last stranded among the furrowed peaks. 



For years this butterfly in the foreground of my Alpen de- 

 sign was supposed to be confined to Mount Washington, but, as 

 shown above, it has revealed itself on other distant summits. It 

 is also credited to Mount Monadnock, and I think revealed itself 

 to me on L the peak of Mount Lafayette, though decoying me 



