85 



flying to the snow-white pink, the whitest rose, or the palest 

 sweet-pea. Nay, not only far more moths will come to sugar 

 set as a trap for them than to various flowers in the neighbour- 

 hood, but as every entomologist knows, the darker coloured the 

 sugar, the more the moths are attracted to it. Thus, even the 

 monarch of the forest, the Purple Emperor butterfly, is drawn down 

 from his imperial throne on the top of the highest oak in the wood 

 to the darksome bait thus set for him on the ground, though hid 

 completely from his sight by the foliage that comes between 

 him and it. 



So much for the organs of sight ; now for those of scent. 



He goes on to state in the very next paragraph that plants 

 reserve, as if of purpose and intention ! their strongest odours 

 till the evening, for the attraction of their nightly visitors. But 

 it is not pleasant odours alone that are stronger in the evening 

 than in the day time, but others that are of a very contrary 

 nature, as we all of us know full well. And, moreover, these 

 all are stronger before rain than at any other time, just as 

 sounds are then more distinctly and distantly heard, thus proving 

 that it is some alteration in the state of the atmosphere that 

 makes the scent of flowers at such times stronger, and not any 

 actual change in their scent itself. 



All this "use of the Imagination in Science" is most mis- 

 leading to those who have not had knowledge or thought of such 

 facts as these themselves, and who then too readily swallow all 

 that is offered to them, if only it he presented in a sufficiently 

 dogmatic manner. 



One more of his so-called facts from another of his books : 



He tells us that humble bees are common in gardens, and 

 scarce elsewhere in comparison, in consequence of their being 

 preyed on by field mice, which are kept down by cats about 

 houses ; the fact being, as any national school boy could have 

 told him, that those bees abound near woods, or in any other 

 uncultivated places where thistles and other wild flowers, which 

 bees are fond of, are found, a hundredfold more than they do in 

 gardens, and that when they are found more or less numerously 

 in gardens, it is only because of there being more flowers in them, 



