ME. A. MUREAY ON MIMETIC ANALOGY. 
Ill 
often mimicked by more — a fact which, applied to the idea of 
hybridization, simply means that that species had a readiness to 
take to itself wives of more than one of the nations round about. 
Out of twenty-eight Danaoid species cited by him, which had 
been mimicked or had families from strange husbands, fourteen 
had families from one each, three from two each, and six from 
three each. It is only what we find in plants ; and some are 
more open to hybridization than others ; or perhaps, analogous 
to our moral experience, that where scope is allowed to our own 
passions, license soon degenerates into libertinism. 
Another feature, familiar to all hybridizers, occurs in these 
mimicries. Notwithstanding the statement of Wichura to the 
contrary, it is now perfectly well known that in attempting to 
obtain a cross between two species we often fail when we work 
with the male of one species and the female of the other, while 
we succeed when we reverse the process and take the male of the 
latter and the female of the former. In plants the cases w^here 
this capability of crossing in only one direction occurs are beyond 
number. Mr. Isaac Anderson-Henry cites many of them in his 
late Presidential Address to the Botanical Society of Edinburgh, 
and in the paper which I have now the pleasure to lay before the 
Committee. The very same thing has occurred with the mimi- 
cries recorded by Mr. Bates. They are all on one side of the 
house. According to my view (indeed, if hybridization is once 
allowed to have been the motive power, it must be according to 
every one's view), the parents were the Danaids on the one side, 
and the cabbage whites (Pieridae) on the other; for all the 
mimicked are Danaids with their special characters, viz. only 
four apparent legs, while all the mimickers, like the whites, have 
their special characters, six legs apparent. If they had been 
hybridized from both sides, we should have had some Danaids 
with the form and colour of the whites, as well as whites with the 
form and colour of Danaids ; but we have not. The case which 
so often occurs in plants has obviously occurred here. The cross 
was taken only from one side. Which is it ? I apprehend, from 
other examples, that it should be on the side of highest organiza- 
tion — that is, that the male parent has been of the lower organi- 
zation, and the female parent (the actual bringer forth) of the 
higher. Now, which is the side of highest organization in the 
Danaids and Pieridae ? Is it that of greatest strength ? If it 
were so, it would then be the Danaids ; for they are larger, finer, 
