THE DE VINNE PRESS, NEW YORK.

THE CENTURY MAGAZINE.

VOL. XXXVIII.

SEPTEMBER, 1889.

No. 5.

WINGED BOTANISTS.

AMONG my earliest memories associated

with nature, and one that will always vividly linger, is that interesting spectacle of a winter butterfly hovering about the farm-yard of my New England home. It was the middle of January, one of those balmy days of respite from the north wind. The patches of thawing drifts lay like mimic glaciers amid their melting areas on the barn and barrack roofs, slowly stealing down the shingle or hovering in impending avalanche at the dripping eaves. High on the ridgepole of the barn my butterfly first disclosed itself, now fluttering against the sky, now alighting with expanded, gently moving wings, sipping at the steamy edge of the snow or sailing across its white field.

In this "lone butterfly" of the winter sun, as Wilson is pleased to call him, we have a representative of a small family of beautiful insects for which the cold has no terrors - the Angle-wings, boreal butterflies, the hardy Alpine species of our Lepidoptera, if I may so speak, for these insects are Alpine in a larger sense than that of mere hardihood. While most of our common butterflies are peculiar to our continent, these winter survivors-the Milbert's butterfly, the Atlanta, the Comma, the White J, and the Progne, hibernating in crevices and crannies during the coldest periods, and taking the slightest hint of genial moderation to lend their animated being to the dormant landscape-are in truth cosmopolitan types, the Painted Lady being common in northern Europe; the Atlanta in Europe, Africa, and the East Indies; while the Antiopa, the prominent member of the group, is an almost world-wide denizen, at home in arctic snows, omnipresent from Alaska to Brazil, and from Lapland to northern Africa.

It was doubtless the spell of one of these butterflies that crystallized the arctic simile of Wordsworth:

Little butterfly, indeed

I know not if you sleep or feed.
How motionless! Not frozen seas more
Motionless.

Look at these remarkable bordering jagged aiguilles, in this Comma butterfly, for instance, this verdant zone traversing beneath the peaks, these merging veins like mimic glacial streams, and this isolated patch of silver, like the tiny lingering remnant of an avalanche in a vast field of striate granite, for the likeness to scratched granite is singularly manifest. All these wondrous hieroglyphs are here apparent to the inward eye, though only revealed to Copyright, 1889, by THE CENTURY Co. All rights reserved.

mine, as though in a mirror, from this storied wing of a butterfly, the "Comma," captured by my own hand on the ice midway in the Mer de Glace of Switzerland. "Every object rightly seen unlocks a new faculty of soul," says Emerson. Shall I ever again look upon the folded wings of the Progne or Faunus butterfly without a consciousness that I now see "through and beyond" where before I had only looked upon its scales ?

It has long been my intention to collect my observations touching the strange intuitive botanical instinct possessed by a large number of insects, notably of the lepidopterous tribe, which, with the exception of the bees, are the most intimately associated with the floral kingdom. For the butterfly,-the "idle butterfly" of the poet, the universal type of dolce far niente,-under the guide of enlightened science, now rebukes the heedless estimate of the past, proving its buoyant rounds to have been directed by a divine purpose concerned in the perpetuation of many of the very flowers which have served the bard merely as a pretty background to its quivering poise. As the lover and companion of flowers, then, the butterfly is thus a botanist par excellence, and, as an ally of the Infinite, a botanist divine. And in the scientific classification of species the butterfly has proved a prehistoric antecedent to the fathers of botany, and an oracle not sufficiently regarded in later times.

Botanical history is full of learned dissensions among the wise-heads upon the botanical affinities of this or that non-committal plant, whether it should be placed here or there among the natural orders. How many a martyr blossom has served but as a shuttlecock in the learned mêlée, tossed back and forth for years ere it found its final rest among its congenial kindred, while a mere appeal to the but

terfly might long ago have solved the prob

lem and brought immediate peace.

Ages before Linnæus, our prehistoric botanist hovered around the blossoming moraines of a Continental glacier, singling out the affinities of nettle and nettle, saxifrage and saxifrage. Is it asked what are my

VETCH, RATTLE-BOX, PUSS

authorities? Fancy; inference; inference tested by analogy; analogy reënforced by present facts; and, lastly, the absolute seal of authority everywhere imprinted in the great book of stone- the witness of the fossil wing and its companions of extinct vegetation. In the delicate intaglios of shale and bibliolite, in the bead of amber, we may find a full text and epitome

I saw a flie within a beade

Of amber cleanly buried;

The urne was little, but the room
More rich than Cleopatra's tombe.

In further reënforcement bearing upon the functions and CLOVER, AND BLACK MEDIC. antiquity of my botanists, Macmillan records having seen several butterflies of the Apollo species at home eight thousand feet above the sea. Another traveler observed a butterfly hovering high above him while on the summit of Mont Blanc. I myself saw several butterflies reveling among Alpine flowers at an elevation of six thousand feet, to say nothing of the occasional wanderers which I observed floating far above me about the crags. Willis chronicles the discovery of numerous specimens in glacial ice fourteen thousand feet in altitude. Moreover, on the summit of Flégère, six thousand feet, I found a large moth which had just emerged from its chrysalis, affording conclusive proof that its entire existence in the caterpillar state had been spent in this Alpen clime.

In the "least willow" alone is furnished a fitting indorsement to the claim of antiquity, and also a complete refutation of the common belief concerning the absence of insect life on the loftiest Alpen summits; as this little omnipresent herbaceous willow, barely three