This was the butterfly that gave Dr. Wallace a headache, “so great was the excitement produced by what will appear to most people a very inadequate cause.”[115] Surely not; for the cause here alluded to was not the insect’s beauty—which had been seen before, free and untrammelled, without any such ill-consequence—but its capture and anticipated transference to the cyanide bottle. It was not mere æsthetic emotion, therefore, that produced the headache, but scientific enthusiasm, of which no man need feel ashamed. It is easy for us on such occasions to mistake our feelings, but the clue to them, I think, is this, that however beautiful a creature may be, and however appreciative we may think ourselves of such beauty, yet if we resolve, in the true interests of science, to take that creature’s life, then the scientific spirit must be far stronger in us than mere admiration of its beauty. This test I would apply to another account which Dr. Wallace gives us of the capture of “one of the most magnificent insects that the world contains.” “I trembled,” he says, “with excitement as I saw it coming majestically towards me, and could hardly believe I had really succeeded in my stroke till I had taken it out of the net and was gazing, lost in admiration, at the velvet black and brilliant green of its wings—seven inches across—its golden body, and crimson breast. It is true I had seen similar insects in cabinets at home, but it is quite another thing to capture such oneself—to feel it struggling between one’s fingers, and to gaze upon its fresh and living beauty, a bright gem shining out amid the silent gloom of a dark and tangled forest. The village of Dobbo held that evening at least one contented man.”[116] When we consider that the “fresh and living beauty” was caught for the very sake of being made dead and mouldy, and that the “bright gem” which would otherwise have continued to flash in the forest was about to become one of those very same specimens that had been looked at with such an inferior degree of interest, we must admit, I think, that the higher of two passions was predominant here, and that the author, in dwelling only upon the other and lower one—mere delight of the eye—has done himself less than justice.