ANIMAL DEPENDENCE ON WEATHER 53 



beasts, down to the flimsy butterflies and moths, live 

 and sleep in the open air, you cannot help wondering 

 how they manage when the station rain-gauge is regis- 

 tering ten inches in twenty-four hours." The smaller 

 butterflies and moths of Europe can usually find shel- 

 tering places in rainy weather, but the broad-winged 

 insects of the tropics are sadly damaged and reduced in 

 numbers. The Indian birds, many of which lay their 

 eggs during the first and heaviest month of the rains, 

 also suffer considerably ; and the monkeys, " huddled 

 together with the water spouting from their long tails," 

 while the deluge is running so fast down branches and 

 trunks that the water may be seen throbbing as it 

 slips down the bark in a thick glaze, must be miserable 

 indeed. 



Evidence of the danger to young animal life at this 

 time is seen in the season at which the young of the 

 Indian deer are born. In every country the females of 

 all wild animals have adjusted the time at which they 

 produce their young to the seasons. In all cases the 

 mammals, more especially the larger grass-eating kinds, 

 drop their fawns, calves, and kids at the time when 

 natural food is beginning to increase, and when the 

 bad weather is over. In temperate Europe these two 

 periods are the same. Winter is over and food steadily 

 increasing in early summer, and that is the time at 

 which the doe and hind produce their young. If the 

 rains, which certainly cause an enormous increase of 

 vegetable food in India, were also favourable to health, 

 we should expect the Axis hinds, for example, the 

 typical jungle-deer of the peninsula, to drop their 



