occurred frequently, and usually in large swarms, he concluded that they must have few enemies, and as he never saw the numerous insectivorous birds and insects hunting them, he further concluded that they must have something disagreeable which secured them from the attacks of these predaceous forms. On the other hand, he found that the heliconid-like Whites were always rare, and he took this as a sign that they were much persecuted, and that they must, therefore, be palatable tit-bits for the insectivores. If it were possible, then, that a species of Whites with the usual white colour of the family should give rise to variations, which would make them in any degree resemble the Heliconiidæ, which are secure from persecution, and if, in addition, those that exhibited the profitable variation attached themselves to swarms of the mimicked form, then these variants would be to a certain extent secured from attack, and more and more so in proportion as the resemblance to the protected model increased. The great likeness of these Whites to the Heliconiidæ, Bates further argued, would depend on a process of selection, based on the fact that, in each generation, those individuals would on the average survive for reproduction which were a little more like the model than the rest, and thus the resemblance, doubtless slight to begin with, would gradually reach its present degree of perfection. [2] _Contributions to an Insect Fauna of the Amazon Valley_, Trans. Linn. Soc., Vol. XXIII, 1862. Bates's hypotheses have been subsequently confirmed in the most striking way. The Heliconiidæ do possess a disagreeable taste and odour, and are utterly rejected by birds, lizards, and other animals. It has been directly observed that puff-birds, species of _Trogon_, and other insectivorous birds, looking down from the tops of trees in search of food, allowed to pass unheeded the swarms of gaily coloured Heliconiidæ which were fluttering among the leaves, and experiments with various insectivorous animals yielded the same result: _the Heliconiidæ are immune_. We can, therefore, not only understand that it must be advantageous to resemble them, we can also appreciate many of their peculiar characters, such as their gay coloration, which must serve as a sign of their disagreeable taste, and their slow, fluttering flight, as well as their habit of flocking together, which must make it easier for the birds to recognize them as uneatable. Everything which marks out these unpalatable morsels, and makes them more readily recognizable, must be to their advantage, and therefore must have been favoured by natural selection (Pl. II, Fig. 13).