ed at first sight to tell a sloe-bush
from a buckthorn-bush. Not so, however, with our Brimstone butterfly:
passing by all the juicy hedge-plants, which look quite as suitable, one
would think, she, with botanical acumen, fixes upon the buckthorn; either
the common one, or, if that is not at hand, upon another species of
rhamnus--the berry-bearing alder--which, though a very different looking
plant, is of the same genus, and shares the same properties. She evidently
works out the natural system of botany, and might have been a pupil of
Jussieu, had she not been tutored by a far higher AUTHORITY.

[Illustration: II.]

{5}

This display of instinct would seem far less wonderful did the mother
butterfly herself feed on the plant she commits her eggs to. In that case,
her choice might have appeared as the result of personal experience of some
peculiar benefit or pleasure derived from the plant, and then this
sentiment might have become hereditary; just as, for example, the acquired
taste for game is hereditary with sporting dogs. Whereas the fact is, that
a butterfly only occasionally, and as a matter of accident rather than
rule, derives her own nectareous food from the flowers of the plant, whose
leaves nourish her caterpillar progeny. So that this, as well as numberless
other phenomena of instinct, remains a mystery to be admired, but not
explained by any ordinary rule of cause and effect.

Having thus efficiently provided, as far as board and lodging are
concerned, for the welfare of the future brood, the mother seems to
consider them settled for life, takes no further care of them, nor even
awaits the opening of the sculptured caskets that contain their tiny
life-germs; but, trusting them to the sun's warmth for their hatching, and
then to their own hungry little instincts to teach them good use of the
food placed within their reach, she sees them no more.

But though abandoning her offspring to fate in this manner, it must not be
imagined that the butterfly mother takes her pattern of maternity from
certain {6} human mothers, and in a round of "butterfly's balls," and such
like dissipations, forgets the sacred claims of the nursery. No, she has
far other and better excuses for absenting herself from her family; one of
which is, that she usually dies before the latter are hatched; and if that
is not enough, that the young can get on quite as well without her; for
probably she could not teach them much about caterpi