GENERAL FEATURES 26 



Nevadas I have seen the delicate Httle Lycanas, Acmon and Da- 

 dcdus cUnging to grass stems in the cold frosty mornings when 

 everything was stiff and white with frost, and large icicles hung 

 from the water troughs. I apprehend that the juice of their 

 bodies is so constituted that it does not freeze readily. At any 

 rate I know that they do endure freezing temperature, and that 

 they are not apparently injured by it. I have never heard of any 

 person trying to freeze a butterfly, but the feeding of the larvae, 

 and the keeping of the chrysalides in cold storage, as on ice, has 

 often been tried ; the only effect being to darken the resulting 

 butterflies. 



§ 20. Non-Feeding Species. 



The Satyridcc, which seldom or never feed on flowers, or take 

 water, and whose individual lives are, therefore, short, are weak 

 of flight, and the butterflies themselves are seemingly lacking in 

 enterprise and vigor ; they do not wander far from the place where 

 they were born. They spend their lives in laziness and indolence, 

 caring for nothing but to mate, and die. Why, then, have they 

 the apparatus for eating, if they do not use it? 



Some moths of the West Coast, both of the day-flying and of 

 the night-flying kinds, which do not feed on flowers, are aborted 

 in the usual feeding mouth-parts, having no proboscis or tongue, 

 presumably because they do not need to feed, or have neglected 

 to feed for so long a time that their feeding apparatus has become 

 atrophied or aborted, so that now they cannot feed if they would. 

 The query is, why, then, are not the similar organs of these non- 

 feeding butterflies also atrophied? Are butterflies a more recent 

 creation than moths? And will the feeding organs in these non- 

 feeding butterflies in like manner become useless and aborted, in 

 time? If so, then these Satyrids will be the first among butter- 

 flies to become tongueless, as they are now in some other respects 

 the most degraded and mothlike. 



§21. FoUR-FoOTED BUTTEKFLIES. 



About half of the genera of butterflies are six-footed, and the 

 rest of them are four-footed ; twenty-three genera are six-footed 

 and twenty-seven are four-footed. Commencing with the genus 

 Heliconia all are four-footed up to and including Libyth^a, and 

 the rest are six-footed. By this is meant that the feet are or are 

 not adapted for walking ; all of the so-called four-footed ones have 



