With great broad strokes the tropical butterfly descends at sunset time to the jungle pool. The soft color of its wings is hardly distinguishable from the mold. It sips the water quietly. A small bird, ready for a feast, swoops down with a whir of wings ... but where is the butterfly? In its place is a fierce owl, bulging eyes flashing, and every feather on his head bristling in eagerness for his prey. The little bird of supper-intentions has precipitately departed, never to return, a permanent lesson learned in the terror of an instant; yet it was learned from the under side of a butterfly. Who so much as a butterfly is a child of the sun? Evoked by his warmth, it comes forth with all facilities developed for the fullest enjoyment of a new life, in which it seeks out the sun-spaces in the damp forest. What a direct response to warmth in the up and down motion of a butterfly’s wings, wide-spread on a sunny mass of leaves! How quickly it folds its lustrous wings and sinks, drooping, upon a flower when the sun goes in, as rainbows disappear at the sun’s withdrawal! Nor does its sun-worship end here; for Iris, symbol of the sun, is imprisoned upon its wings. Those magic wings! Nature writes upon them all the changes which the organism undergoes, the patterns of the minute feathers, the direction of the fine veins, their shapes, their pencillings varying with the slightest external change. Each can be distinguished from all the rest by what is written on these evanescent tablets, the most delicate on which laws have ever been inscribed. The Peruvian butterflies have a world-wide reputation, from the triple-tailed _theclas_ making up in elegance of form for their diminutive size, to the azure _morphos_, those noble insects as large as two hands laid side by side, the desideratum of collectors who press their burnished wings between glass walls. Abnormal tails reach in abnormal directions like ingrowing horns, sharply pointed and oddly curved. An imp-like dot of silver near by calls attention to them. Bold, uneven blotches of gold and black are surrounded by demure, parallel lines. A spot of crimson pulsates in the midst of a whole wing of iridescence. The extravagant creature carries his black velvet body about on yellow legs. Some are as finely mottled as partridge feathers. In others the design just glimmers through mother-of-pearl. Some are transparent in color, a stained glass window leaded in design with living veins. The spaces between veins, however small, are exquisitely fashioned, and always the corresponding patterns of the two sides are perfectly aligned. Some are transparent like dragon-flies’ wings. Some are almost veinless, visible only by a dip of color on the tip of the wing--phantom butterflies. From others, apparently colorless, certain lights can flash the segment of a rainbow. What fine fitness in a French expression for the blues--_papillons noirs_!