2C 
THE BUTTERFLY FARM AT THE ZOO 
A collection of tropical butterflies and moths 
reared in the Zoological Gardens was exhibited in 
the rooms of the Royal Society at their annual 
soiree in 1893. The fact that such perfect and 
beautiful examples of the frail and fantastic forms 
which by night fill the place taken by the humming- 
birds by day, in the steaming tropical forest, have 
lived in the precincts of a London park, is sufficient 
justification, if any be required, for their presence 
among such practical and progressive surroundings. 
Readers of Kenelm Chillingly , one of the latest and 
most extravagant of Bulwer Lytton’s romances, may 
remember that one of the airy fancies of his youthful 
and impossible heroine, is to keep pet butterflies in 
cages, and to shed floods of tears over their untimely 
death. They manage things better in the butterfly 
farm at the Zoo, where the brilliant insects, after 
their brief day is over, pass by a kind of metempsy- 
chosis from the catalogue of living to that of dead 
specimens, and figure anew in the list of “ additions 
to the collections of the Society.” 
