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Updated: May 3, 2025
Though they dwell in an aggregate way they have scarcely a semblance of social order, and are without the wide range of peculiar instincts which we invariably find among the commonwealth animals. The order of Lepidoptera, in which these creatures belong, though the most beautiful, appears to be from an intellectual point of view the least advanced of our insects.
By this means many, and it seems to me valid reasons may be brought up in favour of the opinion that the most ancient Insects approached more nearly to the existing Orthoptera, and perhaps to the wingless Blattidae, than to any other order, and that the "complete metamorphosis" of the Beetles, Lepidoptera, etc., is of later origin.
I lay it at the Pope's door, every mite o' it, an' you'd better believe he'll have to answer for sech carryin's on, some o' these days!" So many other things having been laid at the Pope's door, I held my peace and made no futile attempt to clear the Holy Father of the dark suspicion of having perpetrated their names upon certain of the American lepidoptera.
The most generally accepted classification divides the insects into nineteen orders; as the Coleoptera, containing the beetles; the Lepidoptera, containing the butterflies and moths; the Hymenoptera containing the bees, ants and wasps, etc. Four or five of these orders will be of more or less interest to us.
But nowhere among the Crustacea is there a mode of development comparable to the "complete metamorphosis" of the Insecta, nowhere among the young or adult Crustacea are there forms which might resemble the maggots of the Diptera or Hymenoptera, the larvae of the Coleoptera, or the caterpillars of the Lepidoptera, still less any bearing even a distant resemblance to the quiescent pupae of these animals.
There are ten species of Termites, or white ants, some of gigantic size, and large dragon- flies with speckled wings, like those of the Southern States in North America; there are also grasshoppers of considerable size, and even the Lepidoptera are not unrepresented.
On the other hand, taking the caterpillar or bee larva, with their cylindrical, fleshy bodies, in most respects typical of larval forms of the Hymenoptera, Lepidoptera and Diptera, as the type of the cruciform larva, etc. * The larvæ of the earliest insects were probably leptiform, and the cruciform condition is consequently an acquired one, as suggested by Fritz Müller."
Finally, as we have seen, various considerations lead to the conclusion that with the greater number of brilliantly-coloured Lepidoptera it is the male which has been chiefly modified through sexual selection; the amount of difference between the sexes mostly depending on the form of inheritance which has prevailed.
The insects in Madeira which are not ground-feeders, and which, as the flower-feeding coleoptera and lepidoptera, must habitually use their wings to gain their subsistence, have, as Mr. Wollaston suspects, their wings not at all reduced, but even enlarged. This is quite compatible with the action of natural selection.
Ent. de France, 1837, p. 77, on the flight of butterflies whilst pairing. See also Mr. As sexual selection primarily depends on variability, a few words must be added on this subject. In respect to colour there is no difficulty, for any number of highly variable Lepidoptera could be named. One good instance will suffice. Mr.
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