BOOKS
Random Ebullience
BY SACHEVERELL SITWELL THIS* is a book of wonders excellently written and produced, and one of the best examples of modern German colour printing. Never again since Gould's Humming-Birds of mid-Victorian times has it been possible to reproduce the scintillation and metallic glitter of a wing. That seemed a lost process, but in Alfred Werner's Butterflies and Moths it is once more in our hands.
On an early page the author quotes these words of an American naturalist ; 'The beauty of a butterfly's wing, the beauty of all things, is not a slave to purpose, a drudge sold to futurity. It is excrescence, superabundance, random ebul- hence, and sheer waste to be enjoyed in its own rights.' Or it could be put in another way that, as with some races of birds and most flowers, the wing of a butterfly is intended by the butterfly, itself, to be enjoyed and looked at as a work of art. Who could deny this to the humming-birds and birds of paradise? And where butterflies are concerned in the beauti- ful plates of this book it soon becomes a proved fact.
But, if in the mood for it. let us begin by wandering through Alfred Werner's introductory chapters, coming to his plates later, and browsing on his preliminary pages. There are 220,000 different kinds of lepidoptera, we learn, about three- quarters of them moths, and the remainder butterflies. The large globular compound eye of the butterfly consists of thousands of tiny hexagonal facets, each of them registering an image, and the Swallowtail has no fewer than 34,000 of these facets. Some butterflies have a sense of taste in their hind pair of legs, for as soon as these touch a sweet substance the butterfly uncoils its tongue and drinks. And under a microscope the scales on a butterfly's wing are arranged like shingles on a roof, nearly a million and a half of them to fifteen square inches of wing surface.
But marvels of this nature are only part of the butterflies' life-history, for this book does not concern itself with the caterpillar or the chrysalis. Perhaps here a word should have been said about the Dutch woman flower-painter, Maria Sibylla Merian, who first traced the emergence of the butterfly from the chrysalis when she went, late in the seventeenth century, to paint the flowers and insects of Surinam. She is not mentioned; and neither is another, and if anything still More astonishing, work of patience and devotion, the !cones Ornithopterorum : a Monograph of the Bird-wing Butterflies of New Guinea, by R. H. F. Rippon, 1898-1906. No two copies of this book are alike, and it is conjectured that not more than thirty copies in all were completed. All were hand-painted by the author himself to subscribers' orders, and only as required, each copy taking several months to colour. This work is among the curiosities of literature, the motive behind its loving accuracy being deep religious conviction. And it/ only remains to say that by one of the little ironies of fate the most beautiful BUTTERFLIES AND Moms: Thirty-six Plates in Colour. Introduction 01, Alfred Werner. (Andre Deutsch, 63s.) of all the Bird-wing Butterflies was only found after Ripp' on's death. However, full justice is done to Henry Walter Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace, and after admiring Werner's Butterflies and Moths there, may be new readers for The Naturalist on the River Amazon (1863) and The Malay Archi- pelago (1869), two Victorian classics of their kind.
And now the temptation is to delay no longer but look into the coloured plates. On the very first page of all there is a marvellous blue-metallic Morpho from Brazil, and the Bhutan Glory, a Himalayan butterfly with hind wings spurred and eyed as in angels' or demons' wings in the Isenheim altar- piece and in Brueghel's Fall of the Rebel Angels. A page or two later, the Purple-spotted Swallowtail from New Guinea is a wonder to behold; and then we come to a prodigious Saturnid from Madagascar, night companion to the Atlas moth of India with wings nearly twelve inches across, and to another and more elegant Saturnid from Brazil. After which nocturnal adventuring it is no more than appropriate that our Death's Head Hawk Moth, with its strange markings, 'is able to emit a shrill squeaking sound.'
There are so many other wonders. The Cynthia Moth, one of the Saturnid silk-moths, of which it is possible to spin a.pd weave the silk, which is known as Eria silk; another and marvellous blue Morpho from Colombia, found (and how suitably 1) near the emerald mines—`the females sit in the undergrowth awaiting the males which sail around the tree-tops'; yet another and extraordinary Morpho, with one forewing of the bright blue colour of the male, and the other the yellow of the female; some beauties of the Amazon basin; a green veined and eyed &tumid, Graellsia Isabella', dis- tribution, surprisingly, 'Spain, near Madrid'; and were it pos- sible to choose one's own favourite, a green and rose iridescent- wing Urania ripheus from Madagascar. What a lovely book! Closing it, with eighteen different butterflies in colour on the jacket, and twenty-four more of them on the endpapers, the only comparable fluttering of plumes comes from the wooden `angel ceiling' at March in Cambridgeshire, where a profusion of angels standing on the ends of the hammer-beams and on the corbels clap and wave their wings. That is one of the wonders of the Middle Ages; and no less than this galaxy of moths and butterflies it 'perhaps leads' us, in the words of the octogenarian Wallace, 'to recognise some guiding power . . . organising the blind forces of nature in the pro- duction of this marvellous development of life and loveliness.'
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