310 THE COLOURS OF ANIMALS 



Battles between males are often quite unimportant 



Referring again to the spiders of the family A ttidce, 

 we read, in the paper quoted on p. 297, that battles be- 

 tween the males were extremely common in the breeding 

 season, but nothing seemed to come of them, and they 

 appeared to be supremely unimportant in determining 

 the issue of courtship. Two males of Zygoballus 

 bettini, 'that were displaying before one female, rushed 

 savagely upon each other and fought for twenty-two 

 minutes, during one round remaining clinched for 

 six minutes. . . . The combatants appeared tired 

 at the close of the battle, but after a short rest were 

 perfectly well, and fought a number of times subse- 

 quently.' Eight or ten males of the very quarrelsome 

 Dendryphantes capitatus were put in a box : after two 

 weeks of hard fighting we were unable to discover one 

 wounded warrior.' The weaker males are probably 

 often driven away, but the crucial point in courtship 

 is to win the consent of the female, and this seems to 

 have been obtained by the tactics already described. 



Mr. Wallace refers to the battles of butterflies, but 

 such struggles are neither common enough nor fatal 

 enough to be of great importance in courtship. I have 

 never seen any indication of a struggle between ' assem- 

 bling ' males, and the courtship of butterflies is gene- 

 rally allowed to proceed unmolested in the presence 

 of other males, although interference leading to a 

 mild kind of struggle is by no means uncommon. 



