This is the worst year for butterflies that I can remember. Entomologists all over England are in despair at the total failure of the insect crop, and have taken to botanising, angling, and other bad habits, in default of means for pursuing their natural avocation as beetle-stickers. Last year\'s heavy rains killed all the mothers as they emerged from the chrysalis; and so only a few stray eggs have survived till this summer, when the butterflies they produce will all be needed to keep up next season\'s supply. Nevertheless, I have climbed the highest down in this part of the country to-day, and come out for an airing among the heather, in the vague hope that I may be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of one or two old lepidopterous favourites. I am not a butterfly-hunter myself. I have not the heart to drive pins through the pretty creatures\' downy bodies, or to stifle them with reeking chemicals; though I recognise the necessity for a hardened class who will perform that useful office on behalf of science and society, just as I recognise the necessity for slaughtermen and knackers. But I prefer personally to lie on the ground at my ease and learn as much about the insect nature as I can discover from simple inspection of the living subject as it flits airily from bunch to bunch of bright-coloured flowers.

I suppose even that apocryphal person, the general reader, would be insulted at being told at this hour of the day that all bright-coloured flowers are fertilised by the visits of insects, whose attentions they are specially designed to solicit. Everybody has heard over and over again that roses, orchids, and columbines have acquired their honey to allure the friendly bee, their gaudy petals to advertise the honey, and their divers shapes to ensure the proper fertilisation by the correct type of insect. But everybody does not know how specifically certain blossoms have laid themselves out for a particular species of fly, beetle, or tiny moth. Here on the higher downs, for instance, most flowers are exceptionally large and brilliant; while all Alpine climbers must have noticed that the most gorgeous masses of bloom in Switzerland occur just below the snow-line. The reason is, that such blossoms must be fertilised by butterflies alone. Bees, their great rivals in honey-sucking, frequent only the lower meadows and slopes, where flowers are many and small: they seldom venture far from the hive or the nest among the high peaks and chilly nooks where we find those great patches of blue gentian or purple anemone, which hang like monstrous breadths of tapestry upon the mountain sides. This heather here, now fully opening in the warmer sun of the southern counties—it is still but in the bud among the Scotch hills, I doubt not—specially lays itself out for the bumblebee, and its masses form about his highest pasture-grounds; but the butterflies—insect vagrants that they are—have no fixed home, and they therefore stray far above the level at which bee-blossoms altogether cease to grow. Now, the butterfly differs greatly from the bee in his mode of honey-hunting; he does not bustle about in a business-like manner from one buttercup or dead-nettle to its nearest fellow; but he flits joyously, like a sauntering straggler that he is, from a great patch of colour here to another great patch at a distance, whose gleam happens to strike his roving eye by its size and brilliancy. Hence, as that indefatigable observer, Dr. Hermann Müller, has noticed, all Alpine or hill-top flowers have very large and conspicuous blossoms, generally grouped together in big clusters so as to catch a passing glance of the butterfly\'s eye. As soon as the insect spies such a cluster, the colour seems to act as a stimulant to his broad wings, just as the candle-light does to those of his cousin the moth. Off he sails at once, as if by automatic action, towards the distant patch, and there both robs the plant of its honey and at the same time carries to it on his legs and head fertilising pollen from the last of its congeners which he favoured with a call. For of course both bees and butterflies stick on the whole to a single species at a time; or else the flowers would only get............