We may picture to ourselves the thousand kinds of regulations of animal movements through instinct as having come about in a similar way; in the majority of cases we _must_ picture it thus. For it is only in the case of those with high intelligence that we can ask whether the animal did not by deliberation help in establishing the purposive variation in its movements. Among insects in any case this could only be taken into account to a very limited extent, although I do not dispute that the more intelligent among them may learn, and may make experiments, and can modify their actions accordingly. But in fleeing from an enemy experience has nothing to do with it, for the first time it is caught it pays the penalty with its life. Without care, and with no idea of the dangers surrounding them on all sides, the butterflies float about, guided only by their instinct, which, however, is so exactly adapted to the conditions of their life that a sufficient number of them to preserve the species always happily escapes all the many dangers. I may remind you of Hahnel's case of the butterfly, already mentioned, which escaped the agile lizard by flying rapidly up from the sweet bait, but settled again upon it without fear immediately afterwards, to fly from the lizard as before, and did so several times in succession. We usually judge such actions far too much from the human standpoint; the butterfly does not wish to escape the death which threatens it; it knows nothing about death; it is not with it as it was with Dr. Hahnel himself, who when he was once in danger from a jaguar in a thicket was so affected by the thought of the death he had happily escaped that he never cared to pass the place again, but made a long circuit to his home. The butterfly does not act according to reflection and imagination; it flies up with lightning-like rapidity when the lizard rushes at it, because this rapid movement, which it _sees_, acts as the stimulus which liberates the flight-instinct, and this works so promptly that in most cases the insect is rescued from danger. Its disposition, however, is not otherwise affected by its narrow escape, and it obeys anew the food-instinct which impels it to settle again on the bait, until the flight-instinct is again set a-going by the visual impression of the re-advance of the lizard. It is the plaything of its instincts, a machine which works exactly as it must. That it is only sense-impressions and not conceptions which here liberate the actions can be well seen in the case of shy species of butterfly like our purple emperor (_Apatura iris_), which flies up like lightning from the moist wood-paths on which it loves to settle as soon as any rapidly moving visual image, even if it be only a shadow, strikes its eyes. For this reason the collector tries to approach it so as not to throw his shadow before him, for then the insect lets the advancing enemy get quite close, and only flies up when the net is quickly thrust towards it. In all probability the eye of this insect is particularly well adapted for perceiving movements, and certainly the flight-instinct reacts very promptly to such visual impressions, and we can understand that it must have been so regulated if, as we assume, the regulation came about through processes of selection, for the enemies of the butterflies, such as birds, dragon-flies, and lizards shoot quickly out on their prey, and therefore those butterflies must always have survived whose instinct impelled them to take to flight most quickly.