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The Pierids

pand from one and three-fourths inches to two and one-half inches.

The females are dimorphic, there being a form in which the ground color of the wings is white instead of yellow (Plate XVII, Fig. 3).

CATERPILLAR.-Length slightly more than an inch; body downy and green in color with faint stripe down the back and a pale pinkish stripe along the side, which has a black border below; or the body may be pale yellowish along the sides.

Food-plants. Clover, vetch, lupine, etc.

With the words "yellow butterfly" there always comes to the mind a vision of this species, it being familiar to us all who live in the eastern United States. It hovers over flowers of the field, especially loving the yellow blooms; but more than all this, it loves to hold banquets around the mud-puddles in the road. Almost any time in August when driving along a country highway we may see at a distance in front of us a shining yellow blotch which scatters on our approach into a hundred yellow butterfly fragments; and if we afterward examine the spot closely we can see the mud perforated with "pinholes" where these thirsty creatures have thrust their long tongues. The roadside butterfly is inquisitive, always wanting to know what is going on; it is a jolly comrade, playing with its mate in the air, where it enters into many fluttering matches which need no umpires. It loves the brilliant sunshine; let a heavy cloud obscure the sun of a summer's day and a field that seemed full of butterflies suddenly shows not one; for to them the cloud is a sign that it is time to hide beneath clover, or down in the grasses, in which places they pass the night.

In this species some of the females are white and are often mistaken for the cabbage butterfly.

Though we all have had such a long acquaintance with the roadside butterfly, I wonder how many of us ever saw its little green caterpillar on the clover. Little wonder that this is so, for the small chap is well hidden, clinging to the midrib of the leaf or to the stalk, which it resembles very closely, and at a touch will drop to the ground.

There are three broods, and it is supposed that the winter is passed in the caterpillar stage.

This species occurs from the mouth of the St.

Lawrence to South Carolina and westward to the Rocky Mountains.

From dewy lanes at morning The grapes' sweet odors rise; At noon the roads all flutter With yellow butterflies.