The phenomena of dimorphism and polymorphism may be well illustrated by supposing that a blue-eyed, flaxen-haired Saxon man had two wives, one a black-haired, red-skinned Indian squaw, the other a woolly-headed, sooty-skinned negress--and that instead of the children being mulattoes of brown or dusky tints, mingling the separate characteristics of their parents in varying degrees, all the boys should be pure Saxon boys like their father, while the girls should altogether resemble their mothers. This would be thought a sufficiently wonderful fact; yet the phenomena here brought forward as existing in the insect-world are still more extraordinary; for each mother is capable not only of producing male offspring like the father, and female like herself, but also of producing other females exactly like her fellow-wife, and altogether differing from herself. If an island could be stocked with a colony of human beings having similar physiological idiosyncrasies with Papilio Pammon or Papilio Ormenus, we should see white men living with yellow, red, and black women, and their offspring always reproducing the same types; so that at the end of many generations the men would remain pure white, and the women of the same well-marked races as at the commencement. The distinctive character therefore of dimorphism is this, that the union of these distinct forms does not produce intermediate varieties, but reproduces the distinct forms unchanged. In simple varieties, on the other hand, as well as when distinct local forms or distinct species are crossed, the offspring never resembles either parent exactly, but is more or less intermediate between them. Dimorphism is thus seen to be a specialized result of variation, by which new physiological phenomena have been developed; the two should therefore, whenever possible, be kept separate. 3. _Local form, or variety._--This is the first step in the transition from variety to species. It occurs in species of wide range, when groups of individuals have become partially isolated in several points of its area of distribution, in each of which a characteristic form has become more or less completely segregated. Such forms are very common in all parts of the world, and have often been classed by one author as varieties, by another as species. I restrict the term to those cases where the difference of the forms is very slight, or where the segregation is more or less imperfect. The best example in the present group is Papilio Agamemnon, a species which ranges over the greater part of tropical Asia, the whole of the Malay archipelago, and a portion of the Australian and Pacific regions. The modifications are principally of size and form, and, though slight, are tolerably constant in each locality. The steps, however, are so numerous and gradual that it would be impossible to define many of them, though the extreme forms are sufficiently distinct. Papilio Sarpedon presents somewhat similar but less numerous variations.