however, had we not already expended our astonishment on the larger
number. How many of us are there who could name even half-a-dozen
varieties? We all know the tortoiseshell and the white and the
blue--the little blue butterflies that flutter over the gold and red
of the cornfields. But the average man does not even know by name such
varieties as the Camberwell Beauty, the Dingy Skipper, the
Pearl-bordered Fritillary, and the White-letter Hairstreak. As for the
moth, are there not as many sorts of moths as there are words in a
dictionary? Many men give all the pleasant hours of their lives to
learning how to know the difference between one of them and another.
One used to see these moth-hunters on windless nights in a Hampstead
lane pursuing their quarry fantastically with nets in the light of the
lamps. In pursuing moths, they pursue knowledge. This, they feel, is
life at its most exciting, its most intense. They regard a man who
does not know and is not interested in the difference between one moth
and another as a man not yet thoroughly awakened from his pre-natal
sleep. And, indeed, one could not conceive a more appalling sort of
blank idiocy than the condition of a man who could not tell one thing
from another in any department of life whatever. We would rather
change lives with a jelly-fish than with such a man. This luxury of
variety was not meant to be ignored. We throw ourselves into it with
exhilaration as a swimmer plunges into the sea. There are few forms of
happiness I know which are more enviable than that of those who have
eyes for birds and flowers. How they rejoice on learning that,
according to one theory, there are a hundred and three different
species of brambles to be found in these islands! They would not have
them fewer by a single one. It is extraordinarily pleasant even for
one who is mainly ignorant of the flowers and their families to come
on two or three varieties of one flower in the course of a country
walk. As a boy, he is excited by the difference between the pin-headed