bright, careless life, — a dancing elf, a creature beautiful for beauty's sake 

 alone, a reveling fellowship of four animated, glittering, flowerlike wings; 

 while on the other hand, if we follow this new supposition, we see a butterfly 

 as a harassed mite of vitality, for harsh need's sake encumbered with huge, 

 masking shields, richly enwrdught with illusive pictures of the scenes amidst 

 which the mite of vitality dwells. The bee's wing and the hawk's wing are 

 evidently formed for action, and for action only, whatever superimposed 

 disguises they may wear; the butterfly's wing, at the present stage of its de- 

 velopment, seems almost rather to be a mask which is also used for action. 

 No doubt, however, butterflies are also protectively served in a still more 

 direct and simple way by the disproportionate bigness of their wings — namely, 

 by the actual elusiveness to winged insectivores which their consequent tor- 

 tuosity and jerkiness of flight insures them. Watch a bird chasing a flying 

 butterfly (which, by the way, is a decidedly uncommon happening — as if 

 birds had learned the futility of such chases), and you will see how great is 

 the butterfly's advantage, in spite of his offering a far broader target, over 

 the "wheeling" beetle or even the swift, straight-flying bee. His body bobs 

 up and down between his wings, and his wings carry him in a crazy, zigzag 

 course — baffling, as a rule, to the most adroit 'dodgers' among birds. 



Among the butterflies whose big, picture-patterned wings have in addi- 

 tion highly diversified contours, familiar examples are those of the genera 

 Grapta and Vanessa, etc., often caUed "Angle wings," and the "swallow- 

 tailed" Papilionidce. 



II. Moths 



There are also many long-" tailed" moths, like the great pale-leaf -green 

 Luna {Actias luna) of North America, and the beautiful, diurnal, butterfly- 

 like Urania moths of South America, etc. These Uranias are not only diur- 

 nal, but preeminently aerial, spending the daylight hours largely in swift 

 and tireless flight above and through the forests. They are marked — rather 



232 



