Mr. Bates, without headaches, has given us some very pleasing pictures of butterfly-life in the tropics, and in doing so he has instinctively, as it were, kept the killing and capturing in the background. “The number and variety of gaily-tinted butterflies,” he tells us, “sporting about in this grove on sunny days, were so great that the bright moving flakes of colour gave quite a character to the physiognomy of the place. It was impossible to walk far without disturbing flocks of them from the damp sand at the edge of the water, where they congregate to imbibe the moisture. They were of almost all colours, sizes, and shapes. I noticed here altogether eighty species belonging to twenty-two different genera. It is a singular fact that, with very few exceptions, all the individuals of these various species thus sporting in sunny places were of the male sex; their partners, which are much more soberly dressed and immensely less numerous than the males, being confined to the shades of the woods. Every afternoon, as the sun was getting low, I used to notice these gaudy, sunshine-loving swains trooping off to the forest, where I suppose they would find their sweethearts and wives.”[117] What a delightful scene! Here, “next to the very common sulphur-yellow and orange-coloured kinds, the most abundant were about a dozen species of _Eunica_, of large size, conspicuous from their liveries of glossy dark blue and purple. A superbly adorned creature, the _Callithea Markii_, having wings of a thick texture, coloured sapphire blue and orange, was only an occasional visitor. On certain days, when the weather was very calm, two small gilded green species literally swarmed on the sands, their glittering wings lying wide open on the flat surface.”[117]