PREHISTORIC BOTANISTS. 123 
I ever again look upon the folded wings of the Progne or Faunus 
butterfly without a consciousness that I now see “through and 
beyond” where before I had only looked upon its scales ? 
Not the least among the pleasant episodes of a recent Euro- 
pean trip was the continual recurrence of this familiar compan- 
ion, the axzdézopa. In the lanes of Cheshire—though I learn the 
insect is here a rare visitor—I was fortunate enough to find him; 
among the dikes of Holland I saw him, and even among the 
mountain crags of Switzerland, hovering high aloft in buoyant 
flight above the sea of ice, as though with heart set upon the 
cloud-veiled pinnacle. How irresistibly,-then, do I return to my 
introductory picture of the snow upon the shingles! What remi- 
niscent innate dreams of eons past were compassed in the flight 
of that brown sylph above the mimic glacial fields upon the roof! 
—for the aztzopa of to-day but links the present with the prime- 
val past. Then, as now, our Angle-wings revelled in the boreal 
clime, hibernating in rocky fissures, and sipping the sweets from 
the fringe of blossoms at the skirts of the glacial fields, its pres- 
ent welcome for the cold being but an inheritance from its sturdy 
ancestry. 
It has long been my intention to gather together my obser- 
vations touching a certain phase of insect life of singular inter- 
est, and one not sufficiently dwelt upon, it seems to me, in the 
literature of natural history. I refer to the strange innate bo- 
tanical instinct possessed by a large number of insects, notably 
of the lepidopterous tribe, which, with the exception of the bees, 
are most intimately associated with the floral kingdom. For the 
“idle butterfly ” of the poet— 
“The sportive rover of the meadows, \ 
Kissing all buds that are pretty and sweet,” 
the universal type of dolce far nzente—under the guide of en- 
lightened science now rebukes the heedless estimate of the past, 
proving its buoyant rounds to have been directed by a divine 
purpose, concerned in the perpetuation of many of the very 
