PENALTIES OF BEAUTY.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXII, Issue LXII, 20 January 1912, Page 10

PENALTIES OF BEAUTY.

Nature, as well as mankind, has a big charge sheet against personal beauty. In the world of insects beauty is often synonymous with poison.

An ugly caterpillar, such as that H: the swallow-tail moth, is obliged to pretend to be a.stick because birds are so keen on it. A beautiful caterpillar, on the other hand, sticks up boldly on its habitat in view of every bird in the sky and is never touched. The reason lies in the fact that if birds took to eating beautiful caterpillars they would find them poisonous and die.

It is much the same in the world of plants. Ornamental geranium leaves are not attacked by insects as much as plain oak leaves, and the vulgar and wholesome dandelion is beset by hundreds of different species of insects, while the most glorious double begonias or double phlox are given the cold shoulder and visited by very few. But besides indicating the presence of poison, beauty often indicates some serious weakness. Ur Sichel, a French scientist, once observed that a snowwhite cat with blue eyes never paid any attention to sounds,' such, as the barking of a dog or the blowing of a whistle. He experimented with great oare, and found that all the white cats with blue eyes were stone deaf, but in cases where the iris of the eye had a little other color in it the creature could hear.

It is highly probable that all horses with blue eyes suffer from some weakness of this kind, and as for insects, every naturalist discovers that unusual varieties in moths and butterflies—varieties of great beauty reared under difficulty—are so weak and incapable that they cannot exist in a state of nature.