THE BUTTERFLY FARM AT THE ZOO. T HE collection of tropical
butterflies and moths reared in the Zoological Gardens, and exhibited in the rooms of the Royal Society last week, naturally attracted less atten- tion than the latest achievements in electrical and mechanical invention, which were there illustrated in such bewildering profusion. Bat 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 Lon- don 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 tsars 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 metempsychosis from the catalogue of living to that of dead specimens, and figure anew in the list of "additions to the collections of the Society."
It would be difficult to picture a more elegant or more interesting sight than the hatching of the butterfly-broods in the "Insect House" during the past few days of almost summer-heat. The glass cases, filled with damp moss and earth, and adorned with portions of tree-trunks or plants suited to the habits of the moths, are peopled by these ex- quisite and delicate creatures, as one after another separates itself from the chrysalis-case in which it has been sleeping all the winter, and, fluttering upwards with weak and uncertain movements, exposes its full beauties to the light. The wings of the largest kind, such as the great orange-brown " Atlas " moth, are as wide as those of a missal-thrush; and the great size of this and other species increases the strange likeness to bird-forms which is so marked, even in the smaller English hawk-moths. The giant .moths of the Tropics, unlike the rest of the insect world, have faces and features not devoid of expression. Some resemble birds ; others cats. Some are covered with long, soft plumage, like the feathers of the marabout, or the plumes of swans. Others are wrapped in a silky mantle like an Angora kitten, or clothed in ermine and sables. The depth and softness of these downy mantles make the impulse to stroke them suggest itself at once; yet when the head-keeper lifts them from the branch on which they rest, as a falconer lifts his hawk, the feeling that they are neither moths nor animals, but long- winged birds, is equally irresistible. Form and texture suggest endless analogies with the higher animals ; but the scheme of colour is peculiar to the tribe of which these are the most beautiful examples. In the Cecropian silk-moths, for example, some five or six of which, at the time of the writer's last visit to the Zoo, were preening their feathery wings on the lichen-covered bark of an ancient oak-trunk, the body seems thickly wrapped in feathers, and, like the wings, is of an exquisite mottled grey, the colour of the natural wool of the Cashmere goat. But the legs, antenine, and parts of the wings are boldly painted a rich red madder-brown. The Indian moon-moth, which saw the light on Saturday last, is perhaps the most delicate in colouring of all. The wings, which would reach from side to side of the paper on which the present description is printed, are of the palest green, the tint of the aqua-marine. The uniform faint colour is only broken by a few crescent spots of a darker tint. But the whole of the front edge of the wing is "bound" in velvet, of the colour of dark-red wine. The body is wrapped in thick and downy feathers of the purest white, from which the soft legs and feet emerge, stained to match the claret edging of the wing. Across the head, and lying back against the dark shoulders, are the fern-shaped antenna a of pale green. Thus, this lovely creature possesses but three hues,--pale green, claret-colour, and white ; but these are so graded and distributed, and so modified by the contrasted beauty of the texture of the semi-transparent wing, the thick and downy body, and the delicate flesh-like legs, that the creature seems rather the realisation of some painter's dream than one among hundreds of silk-producing insects. We once heard the generic difference between angels and fairies stated with all the certainty which was due to the youth of the speaker :—" Angels have birds' wings, and fairies have butterflies' wings, of course !" was the indignant answer to the difficulty raised. Imps, too, have bats' wings. But the wings of the moth have not yet been appropriated to the human embodiment of the unseen denizens of the air. There is a soft- ness and reserve of colouring, and an uncertainty of outline in the moths' wing, which mark it at once as something distinct from the sharply cut, and brilliantly coloured forms of their butterfly relations. Perhaps the most brightly coloured moths which are raised in the house are the Eaelea regodis, which are covered with a net-work of orange, rivalling in colour the inner flesh of a melon, on a ground of greenish grey; and the Bodes imperialis, in which an exquisite shade of "old rose" invades and is lost in a rich cream-coloured ground.
Not the least beautiful among the giant moths is the splendid creature from the cocoons of which the wild silks of India are wound. This is a far larger and finer moth than that which produces the Chinese tussor-silk. Its wings are "old gold" in colour, with two large transparent eyes on each, fringed with rose-colour. These, according to Hindoo superstition, are the finger-marks of the god Vishnu, and the Tussor moth is, therefore, sacred to that deity. But it is among the wild demon-worshipping Santhals that the Indian silk-moth has its native home. In the boundless upland forests, the trees on which it feeds are covered with thousands of the cocoons, which are gathered by these wild tribes, and sold to the silk-winders of the plains. Numbers of these fine cocoons line the cases at the Zoo each with the living pupa inside. The cocoons are beautiful objects in themselves, nearly the size of a walnut in the rind, and hanging by stalks firmly twisted to the supporting twigs, like rows of melons. Their colour varies through all shades of silvery or pur- plish-grey, streaked all over, like the egg of a yellow- hammer, with fine irregular dark-purple lines. The silk threads of which they are woven are fiat, like tape, not round, like the ordinary floss-silk of Europe; and it is to this flat and irregular form of the thread that the beauty of woven tussor-silk is mainly due. It may be doubted whether the cultivation of the Tussor moth will spread to the West, like that of the common "silkworm." But the time is not far distant when this, and probably others of the fifty- nine species of silk-producing larva) which were exhibited in the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, will become an additional source of wealth in the wide forest-regions of our Indian Empire. In their scheme of colour, the butterflies are to the moths what the fabrics of Europe are to the webs of Cashmere or the carpets of Daghestan. A score of the lovely swallow- tailed butterfly may now be seen fluttering in their cage. The bottom of their glass mansion is covered with short pieces of osier-stick, each one of which is pierced up the centre with a tunnel, at the end of which lies the pupa of that strange in- stance of protective mimicry, the hornet clear-wing. Another case is full of the scarce pale variety of the swallow-tail, and a third of the American swallow-tail, the female of which is black, spangled with what seems a shining dust of sapphires. But perhaps the most beautiful of all the butterfly-broods is the swarm of Papitio Cresphontes. The case is full of these lovely butterflies, black above, with beaded spots of pale yellow; yellow below, with beaded lines of black. When last seen by the writer, some were flying from side to side of the cage; some had alighted, or were in the act of alighting, and others on the moss at the battom were sipping the juices of ripe grapes.
Among the butterfly cages is a glass case which, since its inmates first found their way to the Zoo, has never failed to excite the utmost interest and curiosity. On the floor of the box, partly sheltered by a few green plants, are ten or a dozen gold buttons, with a red-gold centre, on a lighter gold setting, edged by a round, semi-transparent rim. If watched attentively, the buttons presently move about on invisible legs, and perhaps one suddenly splits, puts out a pair of wings, and flies. These astonishing beetles, which are at 'present unnamed, are from Ceylon. Above, they exactly re- semble an embossed gold sleeve-button, with a rim of yellow -talc. Laid on their backs, the under-side of a golden beetle ap- pears, surrounded with the same semi-transparent rim. Trap- door spiders also flourish in the Insect House, and have made 'several eaves, with most ingenious doors, in a large piece of rotten wood with rugged lichen-covered bark. The doors are .quite irregular in shape, made to fit the surface of the hole in which the spider lives, and are of all sizes, from that of a walnut-shell to a pea. The door exactly fits the orifice, how- ever irregular its shape, and is so cleverly covered with pieces of wood and lichen woven into the fabric, that it exactly resen:thles the surrounding bark ; and even a prying tit might omit to probe it with its bill. But the spiders are a Yong-lived race. The butterfly-broods, like the rise of the May-fly, will wait for no man's leisure.
Previous page
