400 
SEXUAL SELECTION. 
Part II. 
and I have been assured by a friend, that these moths 
repeatedly visited flowers painted on the walls of a room 
in the South of France. The common white butterfly, 
as I hear from Mr. Doubleday, often flies down to a bit 
of paper on the ground, no doubt mistaking it for one of 
its own species. Mr. Collingwood 17 in speaking of the 
difficulty of collecting certain butterflies in the Malay 
Archipelago, states that “ a dead specimen pinned upon 
a conspicuous twig will often arrest an insect of the 
“ same species in its headlong flight, and bring it down 
“ within easy reach of the net, especially if it be of the 
“ opposite sex.” 
The courtship of butterflies is a prolonged affair. The 
males sometimes fight together in rivalry ; and many 
may be seen pursuing or crowding round the same 
female. If, then, the females do not prefer one male to 
another, the pairing must be left to mere chance, and 
this does not appear to me a probable event. If, on the 
other hand, the females habitually, or even occasionally, 
prefer the more beautiful males, the colours of the latter 
will have been rendered brighter by degrees, and will 
have been transmitted to both sexes or to one sex, 
according to which law of inheritance prevailed. The 
process of sexual selection will have been much facili- 
tated, if the conclusions arrived at from various kinds of 
evidence in the supplement to the ninth chapter can be 
trusted ; namely that the males of many Lepidoptera, 
at least in the imago state, greatly exceed in number 
the females. 
Some facts, however, are opposed to the belief that 
female butterflies prefer the more beautiful males ; thus, 
as I have been assured by several observers, fresh females 
may frequently be seen paired with battered, faded or 
17 ‘ Eambles of a Naturalist in the Chinese Seas/ 1808, p. 182. 
