The usual notion of a butterfly is of a gay fluttering thing, whose broad painted wings are covered with a mealy stuff that comes off with handling. This is all very well for a general idea, but the characters that form it are common to some other insects besides butterflies. Moths and hawk-moths have mealy wings, and are often gaily coloured too; whilst, on the other hand, some butterflies are as dusky and plain as possible. Thus the crimson-winged Tiger, and Cinnabar _moths_ get the name of _butterflies_, and the Meadow brown _butterfly_ is as sure to be called a _moth_. So, as neither colouring nor mealy wings furnish us with the required definition, we must find some concise combination of characters that _will_ answer the purpose. _Butterflies, then, are insects with mealy wings, and whose horns (called "antennæ") have a clubbed or thickened tip, giving them more or less resemblance to a drum-stick._ So the difference in the shape of the _antennæ_ is the _chief_ outward mark of distinction between butterflies and moths, the latter having _antennæ_ of various shapes, threadlike or featherlike, but _never clubbed at the tip_. Having thus settled how a butterfly is to be recognized at sight, let us see what butterfly _life_ is: how the creature lives, and has lived, in the stages preceding its present airy form. [Illustration: I.] {3} In like manner with other insects, all butterflies commence their existence enclosed in minute _eggs_; and these eggs, as if shadowing forth the beauty yet undeveloped whose germ they contain, are themselves such curiously beautiful objects, that they must not be passed over without admiring notice. It seems, indeed, as if nature determined that the ornamental character of the butterfly should commence with its earliest stage; form, and not colour, being employed in its decoration, sculpture being here made the forerunner of painting. Some of these forms are roughly shown on Plate II. (figs. 1-7), but highly magnified; for as these eggs are really very tiny structures, such as would fall easily through a pin-hole, the aid of a microscope is of course necessary to render visible the delicate sculpture that adorns their surface. The egg (fig. 1, Plate II.) of the common Garden white butterfly (_Pieris Brassicæ_) is among the most graceful and interesting of these forms, and also the most easily obtained. It reminds us of some antique vessel, ribbed and fluted with consummate elegance and regularity.