r24 STARLIGHT AND SUNSHINE. 
flowers which through the centuries had served the bard merely 
as a pretty background to its quivering poise. As the lover and 
companion of flowers, then, the butterfly is thus a botanist par 
excellence, and as an ally of the Infinite, a botanist divine. But 
it is not with either of these functions, so ably dwelt upon by 
more learned pens than mine, that I am at present concerned. 
In another more literal and prosaic, perhaps, but equally marvel- 
lous resource —the scientific classification of species—the butter- 
fly has proven a prehistoric antecedent to the fathers of botany, 
and an oracle not sufficiently regarded in later times. 
Botanical history is full of learned dissensions among the 
wise heads upon the botanical affinities of this or that non-com- 
mittal plant, whether it should be placed here or there among the 
natural orders. How many a martyr blossom has served but as a 
shuttlecock in the learned mzélée, tossed back and forth for years 
ere it found its final rest among its congenial kindred, while a 
mere appeal to the butterfly might long ago have solved the 
problem and brought immediate peace. 
Unimaginable ages before Linnzeus, our prehistoric botanist 
hovered around the blossoming moraines, singling out the affini- 
ties of nettle and nettle, saxifrage and saxifrage, and linked them 
all in its flight. What are my authorities, is it asked? Fancy 
and inference—inference tested by analogy, analogy reinforced by 
present facts, and, last, the absolute seal of authority everywhere 
imprinted in the great book of stone—the witness of the fossil 
wing and its companion tribes of extinct vegetation. 
In the delicate intaglios of the shale and bibliolite, in the 
bead of amber we may find a full text and epitome: 
“T saw a flie within a beade 
' Of amber cleanly buried; 
, The urne was little, but the room 
More rich than Cleopatra’s tombe.” 
\In the heart of this limpid shrine are entombed thousands of 
species now extinct, while even the solid rock has divulged a 
