The Recognition of Sex 221 



Others had entered the kitchen, and still others were 

 found in various rooms wherever there was a chance 

 for them to enter. . . . 



"It was a memorable night — the Night of the 

 Great Peacock! Come from all points of the com- 

 pass, warned I know not how, here wete forty lovers 

 eager to do homage to the maiden princess that 

 morning born in the sacred precincts of my study." 

 The night was one of black darkness, yet the moths 

 threaded their way through the trees surrounding 

 the house, and came through open windows into 

 darkened rooms without abrading in the least the 

 scaly covering of their wings. But keen as the sense 

 of sight in these insects may be it is not through this 

 sense that the males are drawn toward their intended 

 mates. "When," says Fabre, "I placed the females 

 in boxes which were imperfectly closed, or which had 

 chinks in their sides, or even had them in a drawer or 

 a cupboard, I found the males arrived in numbers as 

 great as when the object of their search lay in the 

 cage of open work freely exposed on a table. I have 

 a vivid memory of one evening, when the recluse was 

 hidden in a hat-box at the bottom of a wall-cupboard. 

 The arrivals went straight to the closed doors, and 

 beat them with their wings, toc-toc, trying to enter. 

 Wandering pilgrims, come I know not where, across 

 fields and meadows, they knew perfectly what was 

 behind the doors of the cupboard." 



Fabre cut off the antennae of several of the males 

 of this and other species of moths and found that 



