PREHISTORIC BOTANISTS. 121 
for though upon the approach of the blighting frosts one by one 
“the painted meadow tribes” have succumbed and fallen, the 
antiopa has scarcely lost a feather from its wing or a buoyant 
plume from its sunny spirit. 
In the bare woods of November he sails across your path, or 
challenges your curious zeal as he merges into rock or tree, extin- 
guished amid his own folded wings. Upon the pungent pile of 
pomace at the cider- mill he suns himself in questionable content 
as his wings 
“Expand and shut in silent ecstasy,” 
joined by a bibulous, convivial company, not only painted like 
himself, but dressed in gayer plumage, though all close akin. The 
Milbert’s butterfly is here, also the Atlanta, the Comma, perhaps 
the White J, and the Progne —for this is a family party, in the 
enjoyment of a seemingly common inherited proclivity. Who has 
not seen that deep orange-red sylph with jagged, spotted wings, 
like a bright, lingering leaf in an autumn eddy, circling about 
one’s progress through the denuded woods, tempting one’s heed- 
less foot in the orchard path, or alighting on the fence, head 
downward, with alert wings out-spread? 
The winnowing process of the cold has left but these few con- 
spicuous remnants, all members of the same interesting group, the 
Angle-wings, boreal butterflies, the hardy Alpine species of our 
Lepidoptera, if I may so speak, for these butterflies are Alpine 
in a larger sense than mere hardihood. While most of our com- 
mon kinds are peculiar to our continent, these late survivors of 
the winter, hibernating in crevices and crannies during the cold- 
est periods, and taking the slightest hint of genial moderation 
to lend their animated being to the dormant landscape, are in 
truth cosmopolitan types; the Painted Lady (and Comma?) is 
found in northern Europe; the Atlanta is common in Europe, 
Africa, and the East Indies; while the azfopa, the prominent 
member of the group, is an almost world-wide denizen—at home 
in arctic snows, omnipresent from Alaska to Brazil, and from 
Lapland to northern Africa. 
16 
