Provence, five butterflies and two moths were found in some beds of marl
and gypsum long celebrated for their fossils, and with the fossil
butterflies were, in every case but one, fossil remains of the plants
which had served its larvae as food. Thus the May-flies and beetles are
perhaps older than the Thames shells, and older than the prehistoric
plants on which the river molluscs feed.

[1] Secretary of the Entomological Society, and an accomplished botanist.
The work is entitled "The Geological Antiquity of Insects," and published
by Gurney and Jackson, London.




BUTTERFLY SLEEP


Fond as the butterflies are of the light and sun, they dearly love their
beds. Like most fashionable people who do nothing, they stay there very
late. But their unwillingness to get up in the morning is equalled by
their equal desire to leave the world and its pleasures early and be
asleep in good time. They are the first of all our creatures to seek
repose. An August day has about fifteen hours of light, and for that time
the sun shines for twelve hours at least; but the butterflies weary of sun
and flowers, colour and light, so early that by six o'clock, even on warm
days, many of them have retired for the night. I climbed Sinodun Hill, on
a cold, windy afternoon, and found that hundreds of butterflies were all
falling asleep at five o'clock. Their dormitory was in the tall,
colourless grass, with dead seed-heads, that fringes the tracks over the
hills, or the lanes that cross the hollows. Common blues were there in