Humanity and Butterflies.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLV, Issue 18, 3 May 1911, Page 61

Humanity and Butterflies.

When Herr Sudermann wrote that comedy of his with the terrible title of “Schmetterlingsschlacht,” he was playing on the very old metaphor that likens humanity to butterflies. We have also been classed with less attractive forms of life—vipers and worms and what not —so the comparison with lepidoptera is not so uncomplimentary as it might be after all. It rates us pretty hard on our fickleness, our fondness for running after things of little worth, and our weakness for roving over other people’s property; but the figure does no one any harm, and when a gifted playwright turns it to entertainment, he even lays us under obligations. Curiously enough, the playwright and the homilist had scientific as well as abstract grounds for comparison, and in a lecture at the Royal Institution in London the other day, the butterfly showed a flattering analogy with man in his preference for certain perfumes. In the epigamic or courtship stage, it seems, the male exhales a scent of a kind determined by his species, and always agreeable—not merely to our way of thinking. but also, we may depend, to the ladies of his class. The explanation, one supposes, lies deep in the heart of nature and the pages of Darwin, but however and wherever the precious dust is secreted, it can only be liberated by an energetic flapping of the wings. Let us hope his little flutter is longer and more frequent than it is in the case of the bee, as described by M. Maeterlinck; or we shall ask with something like commiseration, “Wlio’d be a butterfly, born in a bower?”