568 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



able family of born naturalists, the Carrs, told me that he had never 

 seen a bird catch a butterfly, and this has almost or quite been my ex- 

 perience too. In Trinidad, for instance, one may see flycatchers catching 

 slow fliers like beetles, by the hour, any day, but never see them pay the 

 slightest attention to any butterfly whatever. I reiterate this here, 

 merely for what it is worth, and am nowise averse to believing that 

 Heliconius is more than ordinarily unpalatable. If it be true that 

 feeding among red or orange flowers has now or formerly so predomi- 

 nated in the life of the red and yellow spotted species, as to make this 

 dress do them more good than harm, it is equally logical that, as in the 

 case of the digging and burrowing animals that I have referred to, with 

 their corresponding rear armaments, butterflies particularly subject to 

 dangerous absorption while feeding, should have been in the whole 

 period of their existence bred to an excessive degree of inedibility. As 

 to the flight of such butterflies as on the one hand, papilios and mor- 

 phos, and on the other, the " mimetic " groups proper, the former two 

 families comprise between them, the strongest and swiftest of Ameri- 

 can butterfly flight, and an unsurpassed brilliancy of costume, bright 

 colors not proving, in their case, to be accompanied either by slow 

 flight, or by equally notable unpalatability. On the other hand, the 

 American so-called mimetic groups proper have a middle-class flight 

 apparently well suited to the by no means open under-brush of the 

 forest, where they go about much in the manner of the genus Hip- 

 far chia in the north. 



Now to glance for a moment at the significance ascribed by ento- 

 mologists to the injuries which are found along the borders of butter- 

 flies' wings. 



Perhaps the most highly artificial and strained hypothesis that has 

 been released from duty by the discovery of the use of patterns is the 

 conception that after a million years' experience birds would not 

 inevitably know what part of a butterfly is edible and instinctively 

 seek it, rather than try to eat the tissue-paper pictures of background 

 painted along its wing-borders. This is entirely contrary to the stern 

 rectitude of nature. One might as well hope to fool a ship about her 

 center of gravity, and induce her to float at an angle that did not defer 

 to it, as induce a million-year-long race of eaters of butterflies' bodies 

 to waste energy over these patterns. 



A butterfly has, of course, a fairly tough body, and wings that begin 

 tough next to the body, but become mere tissue-paper at the lateral 

 borders. Now, every slightest contact is perilous to the entirety of 

 these borders, and, at the same time every circumstance of the butter- 

 fly's life threatens contact to them. Even the wind may blow things 

 against them, and when the butterfly is pursued by an aerial enemy, 

 his own efforts to escape must often bring them into collision with 

 vegetation. Again, if the pursuer be a bird, his swoops bring him into 



