LAST YEARS. 315 



him, Philip Gosse showed no inclination to take up the 

 pen which had slipped from his fingers fifteen years before. 

 It seemed now wholly improbable that he would ever 

 resume authorship, but with the approach of his seventieth 

 year this instinct also was reawakened. In March, 1879, 

 he published as a separate brochure a memoir on The 

 Great Atlas Moth of India {Attacus Atlas), with a coloured 

 plate of its transformations. In October of the same year 

 he became a member of the Entomological Society, and in 

 June, 1880/ he printed a monograph on the velvet-black 

 butterfly, with emerald bands and crimson spots, which 

 swarms in the forests of Jamaica, Urania sloanus. This 

 again was followed by a pamphlet on The Butterflies of 

 Paraguay. 



These small memoirs were but the preliminaries to 

 an entomological work of wide extent, demanding the 

 expenditure of a great deal of leisure and laborious 

 research. For a considerable time past the attention of 

 Philip Gosse had been increasingly drawn to the singular 

 forms and the variety of function of the prehensile appa- 

 ratus employed in reproduction by the large butterflies 

 which he had reared under his close personal observation. 

 The only authority on this subject of the genital armature 

 of the butterflies had been Dr. Buchanan White, who had 

 expressed regret that he had been unable to examine any 

 but European species. He had added : " It is much to be 

 desired that some one, who has at his command a large 

 collection of the butterflies of all regions, should investi- 

 gate, more extensively than I have been able to do, the 

 structure of the genital armature." My father had followed 

 this recommendation, and in examining his great tropical 

 specimens had discovered so much that was singular, and 

 wholly new to science, that he became anxious to give 

 publicity to his observations. He carried, moreover, his 



