A small red-and-black butterfly poises statuesque above the purple blossom of this tall field-thistle. With its long sucker it probes industriously floret after floret of the crowded head, and extracts from each its wee drop of buried nectar. As it stands just at present, the dull outer sides of its four wings are alone displayed, so that it does not form a conspicuous mark for passing birds; but when it has drunk up the last drop of honey from the thistle flower, and flits joyously away to seek another purple mass of the same sort, it will open its red-spotted vans in the sunlight, and will then show itself off as one among the prettiest of our native insects. Each thistle-head consists of some two hundred separate little bell-shaped blossoms, crowded together for the sake of conspicuousness into a single group, just as the blossoms of the lilac or the syringa are crowded into larger though less dense clusters; and, as each separate floret has a nectary of its own, the bee or butterfly who lights upon the compound flower-group can busy himself for a minute or two in getting at the various drops of honey without the necessity for any further change of position than that of revolving upon his own axis. Hence these composite flowers are great favourites with all insects whose suckers are long enough to reach the bottom of their slender tubes. The butterfly's view of life is doubtless on the whole a cheerful one. Yet his existence must be something so nearly mechanical that we probably overrate the amount of enjoyment which he derives from flitting about so airily among the flowers, and passing his days in the unbroken amusement of sucking liquid honey. Subjectively viewed, the butterfly is not a high order of insect; his nervous system does not show that provision for comparatively spontaneous thought and action which we find in the more intelligent orders, like the flies, bees, ants, and wasps. His nerves are all frittered away in little separate ganglia distributed among the various segments of his body, instead of being governed by a single great central organ, or brain, whose business it always is to correlate and co-ordinate complex external impressions. This shows that the butterfly's movements are almost all automatic, or simply dependent upon immediate external stimulants: he has not even that small capacity for deliberation and spontaneous initiative which belongs to his relation the bee. The freedom of the will is nothing to him, or extends at best to the amount claimed on behalf of Buridan's ass: he can just choose which of two equidistant flowers shall first have the benefit of his attention, and nothing else. Whatever view we take on the abstract metaphysical question, it is at least certain that the higher animals can do much more than this. Their brain is able to correlate a vast number of external impressions, and to bring them under the influence of endless ideas or experiences,