FORE PART OF A BROWN BUTTERFLY
(Agrynnis cybele, Fab.)
It is hard to realize that this is the portrait of the head and fore part of a beautiful brown butterfly.
Its head is almost all taken up with the gigantic eyes, which are composed of thousands of tiny facets. The long, trunklike mouth with which it sucks the nectar from the flowers is coiled up like a watch spring. Like shingles on a roof, the scales are fastened in tiers over the broad surface of the wings stretched over the stiff ribs or framework.
The white spots are made by hundreds of white scales and the brown blotches by brown scales, and what these scales are for nobody seems to know. Perhaps they help to grip the wind, for they have running lengthwise of them deep and parallel corrugations so small and fine that were a single scale as large as a lady’s opened fan these corrugations would represent its sticks.
The caterpillar from which this splendid creature came is black, with branching spines, and feeds at night on violets and other plants.
The graceful beauty of the butterfly, its seemingly happy existence, its life among the flowers, where it sips the nectar that the flowers provide, are all a part of common knowledge.