Effect of offering Insects ^ Larvce, and Pujpce to Birds. 463 LIX. — Notes made during the Summer of 1887 on the Effect of offering various Insects^ Larvce, and Pupce to Birds. By Arthur' G. Butler, F.L.S., F.Z.S.,&c. A FEW weeks ago I received an envelope bj post containing all the letters and notes which I sent to Mr. Poulton in 1887. Nowordof explanationaccompanied this missive; and altliough such an action appeared hardly in accordance with my, perhaps strained, ideas of strict courtesy, I could not but presume that the envelope must have been forwarded by Mr. Poulton. That the shoi't communication whicli I published in the * Annals ' for August should be assumed to be intended for a personal attack upon Mr. Poulton never entered my head ; indeed, I supposed that he, in common with all who delight in the study of natural history, would have welcomed any facts, even though apparently adverse to a pet theory, which tended to throw light upon a sul^ject which he had long and eagerly studied Few things ever astonished me more than the hostile atti-tude which I\Ir. Poulton assumed with regard to that innocent paper, or the cruel misconstructions which he put upon the most harmless remarks made therein ; that my comment touching the repeated reproduction of a few compa;ratively unimportant observations of my own should have been dislo-cated into a claim to the origination of Wallace^s theory is too absurd to be considered seriously. In spite of my much-valued friend Mr. Weir's careful experiments, as also those of Messrs. Fritz Miiller, Weismann, and Poulton, I still insist that, so long as a few desultory observations are incessantly forced into a front place, it is an evidence qf how little has hitherto been done, upon which to establish the truth of a theory ; many more observers are wanted, and all their obser-vations must be impartially treated if we are to arrive at exact scientific truth. 1 was not aware that Mr. Poulton had made a selection of " the most interesting results " of my recent experiments for publication in the Keport of the British Association, or I should not have said " so far nothing seems to have come of it ; '" nevertheless, as it is impossible for any one man to judge how far even apparently uninteresting results may eventually tell for or against a theory — as, too, Mr. Poulton has evidently forgotten some of those facts when he comments upon Zeuzera cescidi and the size of the spiders offered to
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