enchanters say in the "Arabian Nights,"
'"become" a blue-winged butterfly of Cashmere,
traditionally the most beautiful of its kind that
the world contains. If to be useful before you
are ornamental be your object, steer in an
opposite direction, cross the Atlantic, and settling
in Mexico or Central America, assume the form
of that caterpillar, eventually a lovely moth
(known as the Noctua pacti) which spins a silk
as strong as any that supplies the looms of
Lyons or Spitalfields. Have you a desire to be
formidable as well as handsome—to be a kind of
insect life-guardsman—drop down upon Canada,
and pass the Indian summer in the costume and
with the attributes of the tiger swallow-tail
(Papilio Turnus). Should your disposition be
genial, it may suffice for you to remain in
Europe and wear the uniform of the Bombyx
potatoriae?, or " tippling moth," which, after drinking
(from a dewdrop), lifts its head up like a
hen: only you must remember—supposing you
believe in the metempsychosis—that, according
to the Institutes of Menu, a moth is one of
the lowest forms of changed existence, and is
the condemned residence of " a priest who has
drunk spirituous liquors."

Should your taste be more for eating than
for drinking, you cannot do better than join
that phalanx, the Processionary Bombyx, which
inhabits the oak (in France), and marches
out to forage in regiments some six or eight
hundred strong, devouring all before them,
and who, says Reaumur, leave their tents
(woven by themselves) about sunset, and
move with the utmost regularity, "each file
treading in the steps of those that preceded it,"
like well-drilled Middlesex volunteers. Or—
to go the whole hog at once in the way of
eating—elect for the appetite of the Cabbage
Butterfly (Pieris Brassicae), which makes a
perfect skeleton of its victim, leaving only the
veins and stalks to attest its prowess.

Little do those who yearn for early vegetables
know why the markets are often so scantily
supplied, or why they abuse their greengrocers,
that useful race who, in the morning, sell the
salad which, in the evening, they hand round at
dinner parties. It is on the caterpillars of
certain moths that the vials of wrath should be
poured, and not on the heads of the unoffending
tradesmen-waiters. There is one of the
Lepidoptera, the beautiful tiger-moth (Bombyx caja),
whose caterpillar has a most inordinate fondness
for lettuces; another, the pot-herb moth (Noctua
oleracea), has not received its name for
nothing; and a third, which has somehow
contrived to make interest with the entomologists
and remains anonymous, described by Reaumur
as beginning at the root of a cauliflower, eating
itself a house in the stem, and so, short-sightedly,
destroying the plant before it cabbages.
But the worst of the lot is that caterpillar,
called, when a moth, Noctua gamma, from its
having a character like the Greek letter G,
inscribed in gold on its primary wings. It is the
greatest and most universal enemy to the plants
which we cultivate for our tables.

In the year seventeen hundred and thirty-
five this insect was so incredibly multiplied in
France as to infect the whole country. On the
great, roads, wherever you cast your eyes, you
might have seen vast numbers traversing in all
directions to pass from field to field; but their
ravages were principally felt in the kitchen-
garden, where they made a clean sweep, so
that nothing was left behind but stalks and
veins. The credulous multitude, Reaumur tells
us, thought they were poisonous; report affirming
that, in some instances, the eating of them
had been followed by fatal effects, and in
consequence of this alarming idea, herbs were
banished for several weeks from the soups of
Paris, greatly to the discomfiture of the lovers
of an honest pot-au-feu, and of the hard-working
devourers of mashed spinach. While on
the subject of voracity, I may introduce to
your notice the caterpillar of the hawthorn
butterfly (Papilio crategi), which, in the year
seventeen hundred and ninety-one, stripped
fruit-trees in general of their foliage. In France
also, in seventeen hundred and thirty-one and
thirty-two, that of a moth which claims affinity
to the brown-tail (Bombyx phaeorhaea) was
so numerous as to create a general alarm. The
oaks, elms, and whitethorn hedges looked as if
some burning wind had passed over them and
dried up their leaves; for, the insect devouring
only one surface of them, that which was left
became brown and dry. They also laid waste
the fruit-trees, devouring even the fruit; so
that the parliament published an edict to compel
people to collect and destroy them. But this,
as we learn, would in a great measure have
been ineffectual, had not some cold rains fallen,
and completely annihilated them. The brown-
tail moth itself has been rendered famous by
the alarm it caused to the inhabitants round
London in the year seventeen hundred and
eighty-two, when rewards were offered for
collecting the caterpillars, and the churchwardens
and overseers of the parishes attended to see
them burnt in bushels. Some of these animals
prefer a diet less succulent than that of
vegetables— for instance, caterpillars of the great-
goat moth (Bombyx cossus) and the hornet-
hawk moth (Sesia crabroniformis), which devour
the wood of the willow and the sallow, the trees
in time becoming so hollow as to be easily blown
down.

Consideration of the " principle of selection,"
so to speak, has led me into the very midst of
my subject; but an erratic course is not
inappropriate when treating of butterflies, whose zig-
zag flight is patent to every observer, and I must
take the opportunity of saying that a staid,
methodical, scientific account of the Lepidoptera
(whose " scaly-winged" designation I retain)
is not to be expected from the writer of the
present notice.

When I— like Moth, Don Armado's page—
was a " tender juvenal," the poem that most
delighted me had for its title "The Butterfly's
Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast." I have
forgotten every line of that poem, but fell