The other day, when I was watching that little red-spotted butterfly whose psychology I found so interesting, I hardly took enough account, perhaps, of the insect\'s own subjective feelings of pleasure and pain. The first great point to understand about these minute creatures is that they are, after all, mainly pieces of automatic mechanism: the second great point is to understand that they are probably something more than that as well. To-day I have found another exactly similar butterfly, and I am going to work out with myself the other half of the problem about him. Granted that the insect is, viewed intellectually, a cunning bit of nervous machinery, may it not be true at the same time that he is, viewed emotionally, a faint copy of ourselves?

Here he stands on a purple thistle again, true, as usual, to the plant on which I last found him. There can be no doubt that he distinguishes one colour from another, for you can artificially attract him by putting a piece of purple paper on a green leaf, just as the flower naturally attracts him with its native hue. Numerous observations and experiments have proved with all but absolute certainty that his discrimination of colour is essentially identical with our own; and I think, if we run our eye up and down nature, observing how universally all animals are attracted by pure and bright colours, we can hardly doubt that he appreciates and admires colour as well as discriminates it. Mr. Darwin certainly judges that butterflies can show an ?sthetic preference of the sort, for he sets down their own lovely hues to the constant sexual selection of the handsomest mates. We must not, however, take too human a measure of their capacities in this respect. It is sufficient to believe that the insect derives some direct enjoyment from the stimulation of pure colour, and is hereditarily attracted by it wherever it may show itself. This pleasure draws it on, on the one hand, towards the gay flowers which form its natural food; and, on the other hand, towards its own brilliant mates. Imprinted on its nervous system is a certain blank form answering to its own specific type; and when the object corresponding to this blank form occurs in its neighbourhood, the insect blindly obeys its hereditary instinct. But out of two or three such possible mates it naturally selects that which is most brightly spotted, and in other ways most perfectly fulfils the specific ideal. We need not suppose that the insect is conscious of making a selection or of the reasons which guide it in its choice: it is enough to believe that it follows the strongest stimulus, just as the child picks out the biggest and reddest apple from a row of ten. Yet such unconscious selections, made from time to time in generation after generation, have sufficed to produce at last all the beautiful spots and metallic eyelets of our loveliest English or tropical butterflies. Insects always accustomed to exercising their colour-sense upon flowers and mates, may easily acquire a high standard of taste in that direction, while still remaining comparatively in a low stage as regards their intellectual condition. But the fact I wish especially to emphasise is this—that the flowers produced by the colour-sense of butterflies and their allies are just those objects which we ourselves consider most lovely in nature; and that the marks and shades upon their own wings, produced by the long selective action of their mates, are just the things which we ourselves consider most............