58 
THE MUSEUM. 
For The Museum. 
CURIOUS BUTTERFLIES AND MOTHS. 
BY HERMAN STRECKER. 
To any of nature’s marvellous works the term curious can only be applied in a 
relative sense, as everything connected therewith furnishes food for unbounded won¬ 
derment and admiration. Of the thousands of known kinds, or species, of butterflies 
and moths, there is on each a pattern, or design of ornamentation, which distin¬ 
guishes it from all the others, and yet each kind retains its distinctive characteristics 
from generation to generation, unless modified by climatic or local causes. It is 
certainly far more a matter of wonderment that all the leaves on a tree should be 
alike, than if they were all, or in part, different from each other. Hence it is only 
the rarity of the various freaks, or abnormal forms, that makes them seem so curious 
in our eyes. Volumes could be written descriptive of nature’s sports; some are 
stable, and reproduce their kind from season to season, as in locally isolated varieties ; 
others are what might be termed accidental freaks, and occur but once, or repeat them¬ 
selves rarely, re-occurring only after long intervals. Some are the result of climatic 
and other influences. In the dry, salty, desert regions of Arizona and Utah, butter¬ 
flies, whose nearest kin in other localities are of dark colors, are white, or partially 
so. Some kinds that have tails to the hind wings, ordinarily, occur in certain sections 
with those appendages very short, or entirely absent. But there are such legions of 
curiosities in the field we are now traversing that, with far more space at our command 
than the limits of this article will allow, nota tithe of them could be hinted at even ; hence, 
but a few can be at present mentioned, and of those I will choose such as are normal 
in themselves, though curious, and, to the uninitiated, quite out of the general order 
of things. Look first at the figure to your left; ask 
any one what it is and the response, promptly given, 
will be that it is a wasp or bee, to which, indeed, it 
bears the closest resemblance ; but the little fellow 
is nevertheless as true a moth as any of the dusty 
millers that fly to your light on a summer evening ; 
his similarity to the bee has caused him to be 
named the bee-moth (Trochilium apiformis); 
though a moth, he flies during the day, and when 
on the wing there is little to distinguish him from 
the honey-making insect nature has caused him so successfully to counterfeit. There 
is a near relation of his that mimics, in appearance, exactly, the great, noisy humble 
bee, and yet others that, when on the wing, can scarcely be distinguished from the 
humming-bird. These latter are known as the humming-bird moths, and occur in 
various parts of both the old and new world, being comprised in the genus 
Macroglossa . 
