Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/120

110, a few grapes." The butterflies are of his kind. The high mountain zone is for them a true ball-room; the flowers are light refreshments laid out in the vestibule. Their real business in life is not to gorge and lay by, but to coquette and display themselves and find fitting partners.

So while the bees with their honey-bags, like the financier with his money-bags, are storing up profit for the composite community, the butterfly, on the contrary, lays himself out for an agreeable flutter, and sips nectar where he will, over large areas of country. He flies rather high, flaunting his wings in the sun, because he wants to show himself off in all his airy beauty; and when he spies a bed of bright flowers afar off on the sun-smitten slopes, he sails off toward them lazily, like a grand signior who amuses himself. No regular plodding through a monotonous spike of plain little bells for him; what he wants is brilliant color, bold advertisement, good honey, and plenty of it. He doesn't care to search. Who wants his favors must make himself conspicuous.

Now, plants are good shopkeepers; they lay themselves out strictly to attract their customers. Hence the character of the flowers on this beeless belt of mountain-side is entirely determined by the character of the butterfly fertilizers. Only those plants which laid themselves out from time immemorial to suit the butterflies, in other words, have succeeded in the long run in the struggle for existence. So the butterfly-plants of the butterfly-zone are all strictly adapted to butterfly tastes and butterfly fancies. They are, for the most part, individually large and brilliantly colored; they have lots of honey, often stored at the base of a deep and open bell which the long proboscis of the insect can easily penetrate; and they habitually grow close together in broad belts or patches, so that the color of each re-enforces and aids the color of the others. It is this cumulative habit that accounts for the marked flower-bed or jam-tart character which everybody must have noticed in the high Alpine flora.

Aristocracies usually pride themselves on their antiquity; and the high life of the mountains is undeniably ancient. The plants and animals of the butterfly-zone belong to a special group which appears everywhere in Europe and America about the limit of snow, whether northward or upward. For example, I was pleased to note near the summit of Mount Washington (the highest peak in New Hampshire) that a large number of the flowers belonged to species well known on the open plains of Lapland and Finland. The plants of the High Alps are found also, as a rule, not only on the High Pyrenees, the Carpathians, the Scotch Grampians, and the Norwegian fjelds, but also round the Arctic Circle in Europe and America. They reappear at long distances where suitable