What crime of ancestors are they expiating? In some forgotten caterpillardom was an act committed, so terrible that it can never be known, except through the working out of the karma upon millions of butterflies? Or does there linger in the innumerable little ganglion minds a memory of long-lost Atlantis, so compelling to masculine Catopsilias that the supreme effort of their lives is an attempt to envisage it? "Absurd fancies, all," says our conscious entomological sense, and we agree and sweep them aside. And then quite as readily, more reasonable scientific theories fall asunder, and we are left at last alone with the butterflies, a vast ignorance, and a great unfulfilled desire to know what it all means.
On this October day the migration of the year had ceased. To my coarse senses the sunlight was of equal intensity, the breeze unchanged, the whole aspect the same--and yet something as intangible as thought, as impelling as gravitation, had ceased to operate. The tension once slackened, the butterflies took up their more usual lives. But what could I know of the meaning of "normal" in the life of a butterfly--I who boasted a miserable single pair of eyes and no greater number of legs, whose shoulders supported only shoulder blades, and whose youth was barren of caterpillarian memories!
As I have said, migration was at an end, yet here I had stumbled upon a Bay of Butterflies. No matter whether one's interest in life lay chiefly with ornithology, teetotalism, arrowheads, politics, botany, or finance, in this bay one's thoughts would be sure to be concentrated on butterflies. And no less interesting than the butterflies were their immediate surroundings. The day before, I had sat close by on a low boulder at the head of the tiny bay, with not a butterfly in sight. It occurred to me that my ancestor, Eryops, would have been perfectly at home, for in front of me were clumps of strange, carboniferous rushes, lacking leaves and grace, and sedges such as might be fashioned in an attempt to make plants out of green straw. Here and there an ancient jointed stem was in blossom, a pinnacle of white filaments, and hour after hour there came little brown trigonid visitors, sting-less bees, whose nests were veritable museums of flower extracts--tubs of honey, hampers of pollen, barrels of ambrosia, hoarded in castles of wax. Scirpus-sedge or orchid, all was the same to them.