A NEW ILLUSTRATED BOOK ON BUTTERFLIES AND MOTHS.*
THE handsome volume before us, though issued during the winter season, is not one which is likely to be thrown aside by those interested in its contents as soon as the fine weather returns to tempt them into the woods and fields. It is the work of two authors already favourably known to the entomo- logical public by their smaller book on Beetles, Butterflies, Moths, and other Insects.
As we notice that the book is "printed in Bavaria," we conclude that the plates are likewise of German origin, for although the highest class of coloured illustrations employed for the most expensive entomological works is perhaps better executed in England than in any other country, yet the cheaper classes of illustration, which are alone available for works which can be issued at such a price as to appeal to the general public, cannot at present be executed so well and so cheaply in England as on the Continent.
This book makes no special pretensions to originality of treatment or matter, having been written as a popular intro- duction to the butterflies and larger moths of Britain and the neighbouring countries of Europe. The descriptions are written in an easy style, and include frequent references to the transformations and habits of the insects discussed, a fair proportion of which, including most of our British species of butterflies, hawk-moths, and Bombyces, as well as • B.itish and European Butterflies and Moths (Ifaerotepidoptera). By A. W 'Carpel and W. E. Kirby. With 30 Uolourel Pates. London: Antil inter. some of the most conspicuous varieties ; their caterpillars and chrysalides, and many of the more interesting European species within the wider extension of the book, are figured on the prettily arranged and, on the whole, very well- executed plates. Fewer plates are devoted to the Noctua and Geometrx, with which the volume concludes. Several of the figures of butterflies, however, strike us as being slightly above life-size, which we imagine to be due to some oversight during the reproduction of the drawings, or in the process of engraving. The expanse of the insects has not been indicated in the text, but in the index; a somewhat inconvenient arrangement, though the omission perhaps makes the text look neater. In the introduction the terms used in the study of the insects, and the apparatus needed for collecting, rearing, and setting them, are briefly but clearly explained, and illustrated by woodcuts. It is much to be regretted, in the interests of British entomologists, that drainage and cultivation are rapidly exterminating many of our most interesting native plants and insects. Many insects which were common fifty years ago, and several of which were practically unknown on the Continent, were absolutely exterminated by the drainage of the Fens. Our authors refer to a capture of the large copper butterfly in 1851 as one of the last; but we believe that single specimens were met with at intervals up to 1860, though the asserted reappearance of the insect at Ranworth in Norfolk in 1859 seems to have been a hoax.
But there are many other butterflies which are on the verge of extinction in England, some of them for no apparent reason. Among others our authors mention the black-veined white butterfly and some of the blue butterflies, such as the large blue and the mazarine blue. Turning back to the last century (at or before the discovery of the large copper), we find a very different state of things in England. Many of our scarcest and most local insects at the present day were then common in localities which have long been swallowed up by the growth of London. One of the older writers figures the transformations of the Glanville fritillary (now almost, if not quite, confined in England to the Isle of Wight) from Dulwich Wood ; and the pearl-bordered likeness fritillary fluttered over Hampstead Heath, while the purple emperor, and even the white admiral, now so local in England that no entomologist has seen it alive who has not visited its special haunts, might be found in the woods in the vicinity. Indeed, Lewin, who wrote just a hundred years ago, and was the first author to give a good figure and description of the large copper, speaks of the white admiral as common in almost every wood in England ; and Haworth, writing a little later (in 1803), makes no remark about its localities or rarity, evidently considering it to be such a common insect that there was no more reason to do so than in the case of the red admiral, which is still common in gardens round London, or any other common butterfly. Haworth, however, has preserved for us the delightful anecdote relative to the white admiral which has been so often quoted by later writers. "The graceful elegance displayed by this charming species when sailing on the wing is greater perhaps than can be found in any other we have in Britain. There was an old Aurelian of London so highly delighted at the inimitable flight of Camilla that long after he was unable to pursue her he used to go to the woods and it down on a stile for the sole purpose of feasting his eyes with her fascinating evolutions." Fancy an infirm old man, in days before trams and railways, going out of London to the woods in search of the white admiral, now hardly to be seen nearer than the New Forest ! But those were days when one might have gone to Primrose Hill a-Maying ; when the black-veined white butterfly, now nearly extinct in England, was common at Mnswell Hill, and even at Chelsea ; when the neighbourhood of Holborn was famous for its roses; and when honeysuckle, on which the white admiral (Limenilis Camilla) feeds, abounded in every hedgerow and thicket ; that is to say, before every wild plant was rooted out by " high farming," a system often, we fear, carried out to the most ruthless and unnecessary extreme.
It is true that a few butterflies not known to the older writers have been discovered in England of late years, or have extended their migrations to our shores, among the latest examples of these two classes being the scarce small skipper, and the tailed blue but these are a poor exchange for all that we have lost, and are still losing, in the way of wild flowers and butterflies daring the present century. Our only consolation is that we can now visit almost any part of the world (and the world is not yet completely spoiled botanically and entomologically to the extent that England has been, though every settled country is rapidly deteriorating in the same manner from similar causes) at far less cost, inconvenience, and danger than our entomological ancestors were exposed to a century ago when they undertook a journey to Edinburgh, as some of them are recorded to have done, in order to obtain the Artaxerxes butterfly from Arthur's Seat. At that time this butterfly was not known from any other locality, and it is still confined to Scotland and the North of England, and is unknown on the Continent, though it is generally considered at the present day to be only a local form of the common and widely distributed brown argue butterfly. Weather, too, has been against entomologists of late years. The palmy days of entomology in England closed with 1859, for the terrible winter of that year, and the succession of cold summers which followed, had a most disastrous effect on insect life, and many species which Stainton recorded in 1856-59 as " common everywhere " can now no longer be called so. Another cause of the increasing rarity of many insects in England is the Wild Birds' Protec- tion Act. We cannot protect insectivorous birds and the insects on which they feed at one and the same time.
In its extension to European species the book before us differs from most others of a similar popular character. Thus, we have figures of the scarce swallow-tail and the Apollo butterfly, both formerly included among British species with more or less plausibility, the poplar butter- fly, and various clouded yellows, and brown butterflies, many of which are confined to the Alps, &c. There is also a figure of one of the forms of the curious little Araschnia levana, respecting the dimorphism of which so much has been written lately by Weismann and others ; while figures of the curious black varieties of the white admiral and of the silver-washed fritillary form another interesting feature in the book. Among the moths, the plates representing the large hawk-moths, tiger-moths, eggars, emperors, &c., are specially noteworthy.
We should, perhaps, not forget to mention that though the indispensable Latin nomenclature has not been neglected, the authors take credit to themselves, not unduly, for having made the use of English names for English species a more prominent feature of their work than has been attempted in any book published within the last fifty years, the tendency, since the publication of Stainton's " Manual," having been to discourage the use of English names as much as possible, even in popular works.
Previous page
