LINN.EAN NOMENCLATURE. 317 



perhaps, the husband as a Trojan, and making his wife figure 

 in the ranks of the opposing Grecians, or vice versd. 



To talk of Greeks and Trojans in connection with Butter- 

 flies, may require a word of explanation to the uninitiated. 

 To such then be it known that, for the convenience of arrange- 

 ment, the great Swedish naturalist founded on fabulous and 

 ancient history an allegorical system, wherein Butterflies, di- 

 vided into sections of Greeks and Trojans, were named after 

 their deities, princes, heroes, nymphs, and plebeians, an in- 

 genious and useful plan, but sometimes involving a curious con- 

 tradiction and unfitness of terms. It would seem, notwith- 

 standing, that the imaginative inventor of this system sought 

 for, and in many instances found, a sort of emblematic personal 

 analogy between his Butterfly and its classic namesake. The 

 beautiful Papilio Ulyssis* bears, for instance, on rts wings, a 

 radiating cerulean disk, which being surrounded on every side 

 by a margin of intense black, gives the idea of light shining 

 in darkness, and this is supposed, not improbably, to have 

 suggested to Linnaeus the insect's fitness to symbolize the 

 wisest of the Greeks in an age of barbarism. The Papilio 

 Priamus in all its regal yet subdued splendor of purple, black, 

 and green, is no unsuited representative of the unhappy Tro- 

 jan king; or the yet more glorious Papilio Menelaus in his 

 azure robes, of the magnificent husband of the beauteous 

 Helen ; while the blood-red Nero may be allowed to symbolize 

 the sanguinary Eoman Emperor. 



* A native of India. 



