Whether it is the male or the female that gives out the green or the orange light, I do not know, nor in my opinion do various monographists in various encyclopædias and text-books, though they make no such avowal, but content themselves with not saying. However, it is not a matter of importance except to the insect producing it, in whose breast the one or the other colour arouses very different sensations—rivalry or love. For there is no doubt now that these lovely illuminations, as well as those of our own glow-worm and of every other light-bearing creature, have relation to the needs and wants of their producers, to whose æsthetic sense, and not to ours, they are intended to appeal. That they appeal also to our own is a mere irrelevant side-issue, not considered, so to speak, by the force under whose pressure these beauties were called forth, and not of the smallest consequence. It was not always thought so, and were the pride of man reachable by such considerations it might humiliate us to reflect that displays, which in real beauty immeasurably surpass our clumsy illuminations and fireworks, are made nightly, not for our eyes, but for those of a beetle. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: INSECTS THAT CARRY LAMPS The glow-worms in this picture are rather larger than life. The male insects have wings; it is the females chiefly, if not solely, that emit the soft, beautiful light.] Gilbert White, however, in the eighteenth century, exclaims amidst some very pleasing verses: “For see, the glow-worm lights her amorous fire!”[148] on which one of his editors of the nineteenth remarks: “This is still the generally received notion, but the fact is that both sexes of the glow-worm are phosphorescent, not only in the perfect insect, but also in the larva and even pupa state.”[147] But this does not affect White’s statement, which is the simple fact, as well as “the generally received notion,” and, moreover, though our own male glow-worm is phosphorescent, it is not so brilliantly so as the female. Indeed, in the ninth edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_—which is later than this editorial note—it is stated not to be so at all, so that even if White believed this—which is not very clear—he has been supported by learned authority for a very long time.