Abstract
AN important addition to the numerous papers of recent years recording experiments as to the influence upon the forms of living beings of their environment has lately been published.1 In this paper the inquiry is concerned only or chiefly with varieties in the pigmentation of Lepidoptera. The author enumerates as among the agents to which change in this pigmentation is to be ascribed “intensity of light, temperature, nutrition, humidity, dryness, electricity, and other meteorological phenomena.” His references to the literature on these subjects are very useful. The suggestion that mechanical movement, jarring, of pupas, might cause effects analogous to those of temperature is mentioned, but this has long since been abandoned. M. Pictet divides the variation of pigmentation into two opposite types, the one “albinism,” by which red can pass into yellow and even into white, the other “melanism,” by which red passes into brown and, as an extreme, into black; and this classificatipn is kept in view all through the description of his experiments and their results. So is a theory which he puts forward, though with diffidence, that caterpillars in general were originally adapted to live only on certain special plants or trees, and afterwards, owing to finding themselves, as the result of migration or otherwise, where these were not to be had, adapted themselves to many other kinds, so as to become more or less polyphagous, still, however, in nature attaching themselves by. preference to special food plants, called in this paper their normal or ancestral ones.
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References
"Influence de l'Alimentation et de l'Humidité sur la Variation des Papillons." By Arnold Pictet. (Mémoires de la Société de Physique et d'Histoire naturetle de Genève, vol. xxxv., fascicule 1, June, 1905, pp. 46–127.)
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MERRIFIELD, F. Experiments on Variations of Lepidoptera by Environment . Nature 72, 632–634 (1905). https://doi.org/10.1038/072632a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/072632a0