51 



The drawings of transformations of Lepidoptera are rarely, if ever, duplicates of 

 those published by Smith, sometimes representing a different variety of the larva of the 

 same species ; and they are nearly three times as numerous. There are only about a 

 dozen drawings of transformations of Coleoptera. Among the lesser known orders there 

 is little doubt that many species figured are still undescribed. 



I fully expect that some of -Abbot's correspondence will be discovered (of course 

 including his autograph), perhaps at the Antipodes, for Swainson left England towards 

 the close of his life, and died, according to Hagen, in New Zealand in 1856. 



I am surprised that Mr. Scudder has not mentioned the volume of Abbot's drawings 

 presented by Edward Doubleday to Dr. T. W. Harris. (Harris, Entomological Corre- 

 spondence, p. 123.) If this volume is the same as that said by Mr. Scudder to have 

 been presented by Dr. J. E. Gray to Dr. Asa Gray, some error must have arisen. 

 Possibly it came into Dr. Asa Gray's hands directly or indirectly from Dr. Harris, with 

 an erroneous impression respecting the original English donor. 



There are a number of specimens originally collected by Abbot in the British Museum 

 and probably in other collections. The Museum of the Royal Dublin Society (now known 

 as the Dublin Museum of Science and Art), contains a large series of bleached specimens 

 of insects of various orders {Lepidoptera, Newroptera, etc.), which were not improbably 

 collected by Abbot (cf. some notes by Mr. McLachlan, Ent. M. Mag. X., pp. 227, 228.) 



Note by Mr. Scudder. — -The small volume of paintings referred to by Mr. Kirby is 

 in the library of the Boston Society of Natural History, and was not mentioned by me 

 bscause the less said about it the better. It was picked up at a book-shop, bears the 

 date 1S30, and though DouWleday paid seven guineas for it, it is certainly not the work 

 of Abbot but of a very inferior copyist, some of the paintings being the merest daubs. 

 It has scarcely the least value. The notice by Duncan 1 had not seen, but I find that it 

 adds nothing to the facts of Abbot's life. Either I have never seen the seventeenth 

 volume of Abbot's drawings at the British Museum referred to by Mr. Kirby, or, if it 

 concerns the moths only, may for that reason have taken no notice of it. My memo- 

 randum of the dates must have been incorrectly copied. 



A CHAPTER ON THE LITERATURE OF BUTTERFLIES AND MOTHS. 



BY A. R. GROTE,. A.M. 



Neither Butterflies nor Moths are mentioned in the different accounts of Creation 

 contained in the first chapters of Genesis. As the Hebrew wants a distinctive term for 

 them they may be intended and generally included under that of " flying things." The 

 eastern people had no understanding for the western rage for classifying Nature ; and 

 the modern type of a collector " coveting " specimens and breaking the commandments to 

 obtain them, had it been known to Bible writers, would have been doubtless held up by 

 them to execration. " The earth is the Lord's and all the things therein ; " this is the 

 leading Semitic notion, and the Jews regarded all Nature as subordinate to the great 

 question of religion. The Arabs followed suit and, under Mohammed, devoted them- 

 selves to the propagation of the belief in the unity of the Deity and to a philosophy too 

 grand to include the minute study of such trifling objects as insects. But the old heathen 

 Greeks and the poets were attracted by the butterfly's wings. With them they adorned 

 the shoulders of Psyche. Love and death they winged like birds. Christianity, absorb- 

 ing and modifying all the old heathen thoughts and customs, seems to have seen, in its 

 earliest Roman days, a religious allegory in the life of the butterfly. To its eyes the 

 caterpillar represented this mundane existence, the chrysalis the last sleep and the 

 tomb, while the soaring butterfly was the soul, winging its eternal flight through heaven. 

 During the Middle Ages people generally were too much occupied with dogmatic 

 philosophy to pay attention to nature, but in Holland, a country which had greatly 

 suffered under the Inquisition and the Spanish rule, at length awoke a passion for insects 

 and for flowers. With the beginning of the sixteenth century the Swiss Conrad Gesner 

 was born, the first naturalist who commenced the formation of a cabinet of Natural His- 



