Let me note, too, just in passing, that while the upper half of the
butterfly's wing is generally beautiful in colour, so as to attract his
fastidious mate, the under half, displayed while he is at rest, is
almost always dull, and often resembles the plant upon which he
habitually alights. The first set of colours is obviously due to sexual
selection, and has for its object the making of an effective courtship;
but the second set is obviously due to natural selection, and has been
produced by the fact that all those insects whose bright colours show
through too vividly when they are at rest fall a prey to birds or other
enemies, leaving only the best protected to continue the life of the
species.
But sight is not the only important sense to the butterfly. He is
largely moved and guided by smell as well. Both bees and butterflies
seem largely to select the flowers they visit by means of smell, though
colour also aids them greatly. When we remember that in ants scent
alone does duty instead of eyes, ears, or any other sense, it would
hardly be possible to doubt that other allied insects possessed the
same faculty in a high degree; and, as Dr. Bastian says, there seems
good reason for believing that all the higher insects are guided almost
as much by smell as by sight. Now it is noteworthy that most of those
flowers which lay themselves out to attract bees and butterflies are
not only coloured but sweetly scented; and it is to this cause that we
owe the perfumes of the rose, the lily-of-the-valley, the heliotrope,
the jasmine, the violet, and the stephanotis. Night-flowering plants,
which depend entirely for their fertilisation upon moths, are almost
always white, and have usually very powerful perfumes. Is it not a
striking fact that these various scents are exactly those which human
beings most admire, and which they artificially extract for essences?
Here, again, we see that the æsthetic tastes of butterflies and men
decidedly agree; and that the thyme or lavender whose perfume pleases
the bee is the very thing which we ourselves choose to sweeten our
rooms.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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