Grain and Chaff from an English ManorSavory, Arthur Herbert
History
Grain and Chaff from an English Manor
Savory, Arthur Herbert
Aldington (Worcestershire, England); Country life -- England; England -- Social life and customs
There is, of course, the danger, too, that children will not recognize
the difference between the female of the Orange Tip butterfly, which
is practically colourless, and the cabbage whites, and it would be
worse than a crime to destroy so joyous and welcome a creature, whose
advent is one of the pleasantest signs that summer is nigh at hand. I
have watched these fairy sprites dancing along the hedge sides at
Aldington year by year, and in May they were extraordinarily abundant
here, happily coursing round and round my meadow, and chasing each
other in the sunshine. The Orange Tip is quite innocent of designs
upon the homely cabbage, the food-plant of the caterpillar being
_Cardamine pratensis_ (the cuckoo flower), which Shakespeare speaks of
so prettily in the lines:
"When daisies pied and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver-white."
Possibly Hood was thinking of the Orange Tip when he wrote the lines
that seem so well suited to them:
"These be the pretty genii of the flowers
Daintily fed with honey and pure dew."
A story is told of an undergraduate who united the hind wings of a
butterfly to the body and fore wings of one of a different species,
and, thinking to puzzle Professor Westwood, then the entomological
authority at Oxford, asked if the Professor could tell him "what kind
of a bug" it was. "Yes," was the immediate reply--"a humbug!"
One of my schoolfellows, a boy about eleven, at Rottingdean school,
and quite a novice at butterfly collecting, met a professional
"naturalist" on the Warren at Folkestone, who inquired what he had
taken. "Only a few whites," said the boy. The man looked at them and,
eventually, they negotiated an exchange, the boy accepting three or
four others for an equal number of the whites. On reaching home he
found that he had parted with specimens of the rare Bath White,
_Pieris daplidice_, for some quite common butterflies. The Bath White
is not recognized as a British species, Newman supposing the specimens
taken in this country to have been blown over or migrated from the
northern coast of France, as they have been rarely met with away from
the shores of Kent and Sussex.
It is surprising to find so many people who seem unable to exercise
their powers of observation to the extent of noticing the butterflies
they daily pass in the garden, or along the roads. One would expect
that the marvellous colouring of even our common butterflies would
arrest attention, and that interest in the names and life-history
would follow.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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