He said to me: Approach and look, what do you see? I approached and looked and saw a wonderful colorful abstract painting. I had not seen the harmony and beauty of its colors in any painting by the world’s plastic artists whose works I had seen in exhibitions, art museums, or the colored catalogs published printed about their works.
My friend the biologist:
I said, having moved away from the microscope that had invited me to look through it at the painting: Wonderful colors and wonderful harmony. He commented on my words smiling: There are no colors at all in this colorful painting. His statement confused me, but I did not doubt its truth, for he is a biologist, and he must mean what he says.
When I found him continuing his smile and looking at me in challenge, I tried to reach a solution to this puzzle myself. I raised the binocular microscope slightly to know what was on the slide underneath it, and I saw the tiny piece that did not exceed an area of several square millimeters.
I said: This is a piece of a colorful butterfly wing. He replied to me, his smile having faded, speaking with the seriousness of a scientist: It is a piece of a wing indeed, but not a butterfly wing. This is a common mistake. People do not distinguish between butterflies and skippers, because they are very close to each other, and the differences between them are few but clear.
The difference between a butterfly and a skipper:
My friend said: Contrary to what they believe, butterflies are often pale in color and not diverse. As for skippers, their wing colors are strong and varied. Butterflies usually appear at night, while skippers appear in the daytime, and people think they are butterflies. I said: So what you took is part of a skipper’s wing, and it is colored, so how do you say it has no colors?
The skipper:
The scientist said, walking around the microscope: Skippers and their relatives from butterflies are both from the order of insects called Lepidoptera, which includes about one hundred thousand species, because their wings are covered with tiny scales, and the wing itself is transparent. These tiny scales or scales are also transparent.
They are arranged in compact rows, like the scales of fish, and their number may approach twenty thousand scales per square centimeter in skippers. From these scales, the skipper acquired its name because when we hold it, fine dust falls between our fingers from these scales.
These transparent scales are what give its wings the many wonderful colors. I almost stopped the biologist to ask him how transparent scales give him his many colors, but he seemed to know my question and wanted to answer it.
So he continued his speech: We know the experiment of the transparent glass prism, and how it analyzes the light beam falling upon it into many colors, which are the colors of the spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.
What the scales do on the skipper’s wings is to analyze the colors of light as the glass prism does, and their composition formed on the wings allows the formation of reflections in various colors, making before our eyes those cheerful colors that we see in the skipper’s wings, whose individuals and groups we sometimes watch flying wonderfully in the daylight sun in the fields and gardens. I found myself inclined to the microscope to look again, marveling more at that wonderful painting, painted without colors.