30 THE BUTTERFLIES OF THE WEST COAST 



The worldly rule, to eat and be eaten, applies to butterflies as 

 well as to all other animate things. But butterflies have not the 

 instinct of fear; they are happy in the absence of a knowledge of 

 what fear is, and they are happy in the possession of a power to 

 avoid their enemies by rapid flight. If you strike your net at one 

 and miss it, you alarm it, and it flies rapidly away, but it soon 

 stops to feed on a flower, or to flirt with a mate, without once 

 looking back to see if you are following it, for it has forgotten you. 



Having no fear, they would not use mimicry, if they had it. 

 Butterflies are able to take care of themselves. During twenty- 

 five years' butterfly work I have seen but one attempt of a bird to 

 catch a butterfly; then it was a flycatcher bird chasing a Colias, 

 dashing after it many times, until, tired out, it stopped, and the 

 Colias escaped. But shall we assume that the butterflies of that 

 region, remembering that attack, will eventually develop simulat- 

 ing devices on their yellow wings? It is absurd. As it escaped, 

 it might more reasonably be expected the Colias would adopt still 

 more flaunting colors, to commemorate the victory, if they had 

 anything to do about it, which they have not. 



Some butterflies habitually alight upon places that are concol- 

 orous with themselves ; most of the Satyridd do this. Take Chi- 

 onobas Gigas; its only alighting place is the bare gray rock, upon 

 which only a gray moss grows, the moss interspersed with 

 patches of lichen covered rock; and when it alights on such 

 a place you cannot distinguish it although you saw it alight 

 only three yards away. He alighted there, but not from 

 fear, and not to secrete himself by virtue of mimicry, for he is 

 only playing, and he dashes out to attack, or to play with, the first 

 butterfly that comes in sight of his rock. Some Satyrids, weak of 

 flight and stupid of habit, adopt as a means of escape from attack, 

 that familiar ruse, called simulation of death; they become ap- 

 parently lifeless, and drop into the grass or rubbish, and remain 

 motionless; but that is a ruse common to many of the smaller 

 forms of animal life, and is not mimicry. 



If a large proportion of the species of butterflies mimicked 

 anything, then the rule or the proposition would stand some 

 chance to hold good, in some degree at least, but not one species 

 in a hundred can be said to mimic or simulate anything. The 

 idea, therefore, that butterflies simulate leaves or sticks or stones, 

 as a means of protection from their enemies, is evidently unten- 



