Nonfiction: Nabokov Theory on Butterfly Evolution Is Vindicated  by Carl Zimmer, January 25, 2011: " Vladimir Nabokov may be known to most people as the author of classic novels like “Lolita” and “Pale Fire.” But even as he was writing those books, Nabokov had a parallel existence... He was the curator of lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University...And in a speculative moment in 1945, he came up with a sweeping hypothesis for the evolution of the butterflies...He envisioned them coming to the New World from Asia over millions of years in a series of waves....“I find it easier to give a friendly little push to some of the forms and hang my distributional horseshoes on the nail of Nome rather than postulate transoceanic land-bridges in other parts of the world...”

 

JM: Does Art and science meet in an insect's counter-fogg flights? *

 

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* In "Ada" the East/West orientation along a spherical Earth is mainly identified with Uncle Dan, an Art-collector(!),  who “set off in a counter-Fogg direction on a triple trip round the globe, adopting, like an animated parallel, the same itinerary every time. As Vivian Darkbloom observed in his appended notes to “Ada”: “Counter-Fogg: Phileas Fogg, Jules Verne’s globetrotter, travelled from West to East”.