BEAUTIFUL HAWK-MOTHS — 223 
and created in our infantile minds an indescribable 
impression of glory, brilliance, aloofness, elusive- 
ness. We thought it a being from some other 
world, and during each of its frequent sudden 
disappearances among the flowering bushes we 
held our breath, fearing it would return no more, 
but had flown right through the blossoming screen 
and back to the sun and stars. To me it was an 
apparition of inexpressible delight, and I longed 
to be a Merrylee-dance-a-pole myself to fly to 
unheard-of, unthought-of, undreamed-of beautiful 
flowery lands.” 
A descriptive passage this by one who is not 
a literary person, a student of expression anxiously 
seeking after the “explicit word,’ yet an expres- 
sion rare and beautiful as the thing described: one 
reads it with a quickened pulse. Who should 
dream of finding its like anywhere in the thousand 
books of British Butterflies and Moths which our 
exceedingly industrious lepidopterists have pro- 
duced during the last six or seven decades? Yet 
these same thousand volumes were written less for 
the scientific student of entomology than for the 
general reader, or for every person who on seeing 
a white admiral or a privet moth wants to know 
what it is and goes to a book to find out all about 
it. These writers all fail in the very thing which 
one would imagine to be most important in books 
intended for such a purpose—the power to convey 
to the reader’s mind a vivid image of the thing 
described. One would like to know what the 
