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1876.] A Colony of Butterflies. 131 
constitutions, and in its retreat it shed, over the lands which again 
saw the sun, floods of water, the source of fresh life and civiliza- 
tions. But it was careful of its own plants and animals ; they 
were to go back with the ice, nor be seduced by the lakes and 
streams its retreat unveiled, and so become companions to the 
mammoth. And it succeeded, for the most part, until it reached 
the White Mountains. Though year by year the individual 
butterflies perished, they planted their successors ; the longer- 
lived reindeers laid their bones by the way, and in the Connecti- 
cut Valley itself, but fresh herds still were ready to follow the 
northward march of the great glacier. i 
Out of the valley of the White Mountains the main ice mass 
gradually retreated ; and here it lost some of its followers. At 
that time the White Mountains must have presented an appear- 
ance not unlike the Alps of to-day, an aspect which, owing to 
their inferior elevation, they have since lost under a climate 
growing in warmth. The local glaciers, which then filled the 
ravines, attracted some of the wayward, flitting Oeneis butterflies 
by a display of the food plants which they had harbored and 
detained from the main glacier. Year after year the great glacier 
retreated farther and farther north, followed by the main body of its 
train, — plants, butterflies, and animals, — the while some of these 
foolish butterflies were beguiled by the shallow ice-rivers which 
then filled the ravines of Mount Washington. Return became at 
length impossible. They advanced behind the deceiving local gla- 
ciers step by step up the mountain-side, pushed up from below by 
the warm climate, which to them was uncongenial, until they 
reached the mountain peak, now bare of snow in the short summer. 
Here, blown sidewise by the wind, they patiently cling to the 
rocks. Or, in clear weather, on weak and careful wing, they fly 
from flower of ‘stemless mountain-pink to blue-berry, swaying 
from their narrow tenure of the land. Drawn into the currents 
of air that sweep the mountain’s side, they are forced down- 
wards, to be parched in the hot valleys below. Yet they main- 
tain themselves, They are fighting it out on that line. They 
are entrapped, and must die out there by natural causes unless 
certain entomologists sooner extirpate them by pinning them 
Up in collections of insects. What time, in Tuckerman’s Ravine, 
I see the ill-advised collector, net in hand, swooping down on 
this devoted colony of ancient lineage and more than Puritan 
affiliation, I wonder if, before it is too late, there will not be a 
law passed to protect the butterflies from the cupidity of their 
pursuers, 
