446 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HIST. SOCIETY, Vol. XXVl. 



Habits — Many eggs are laid at a time irregularly on the uppersides 

 of leaves on stalks, branches, buds ; the young egg-larvao living 

 gregariously and continuing thus up to the last moult when they 

 separate, each going its own way. The pupation takes place on the 

 ground at the foot of the creeper as a rule in a crevice, under a dead 

 leaf, &c., and there seems to be no body-band — only the tail fixing. 

 The larvae is never attended by ants, at least none have ever been 

 noticed in their company. The growth of the caterpillar is rapid 

 and the pupal stage only lasts seven days. The butterfly is strong- 

 winged and of rapid flight but rarely seems to make use of its powers. 

 It is sluggish when put up, flies only a short distance and settles again 

 suddenly. It has the habit of walldng about when settled on leaves, 

 stalks, twigs and branches and always with the wings tightly closed 

 over the back. It seldom, if ever, visits flowers, neither does it seem 

 to feed on the juices of trees or suck water from the ground but 

 apparently passes its life amongst the foliage of trees ; and seems to 

 prefer dense scrub- jungle in regions of heavy rainfall to anything 

 else. The foodplant is Olax wightiana of the family Olacincce. The 

 habitat of A. aniia is India, Ceylon, Burma and Siam. It is plenti- 

 ful at sea-level on the coast of Kanara in Bombay and up to 1,800' 

 in the hills immediately above. 



22. Genus — ^Akhopala. 



As at present accepted, this genus contains about one hundred species, 

 mostly Oriental from Lidia, Ceylon, the Andamans, Burma, the Malay Penin- 

 sula, throughout the Malay Archipelago ; some being also found in China, Japan 

 and one or two in Australia. De NiceviUe in his Butterflies of India, Burma 

 and Ceylon, writes a short history of the genus in which he characterizes it as 

 unwieldy, but says that there is no way as jet discovered of dividing it up, as 

 the venation of the wings offers no basis. He states that the outline of the 

 wing in different species varies much, in some there is a tail to the hindwing, 

 in others none, and the colour of the uppersides is some shade of blue, more or 

 less constant for each species, though differing in the sexes of the same butterfly 

 sometimes, as, for example, the extreme case of a group, the type of which is 

 Arhopala eumolplms from Sikkim, Nepal, Assam through Burma and Malay 

 to Borneo, in which the males are metaUic-green, the females blue. He further 

 remarks : " An Arhopala is unmistakable, the merest t\To in oriental butterflies 

 should at once be able to distinguish any species as belonging to the genus, 

 which contains some of the largest as well as the most beautiful of the 

 Lyccenidce. Nearly all the species are of some shade of blue or purple on a black 

 ground on the upperside, the females with the blue or purple colour always 

 more restricted than in the male . . . Most fortunately the under- 

 sides of both sexes are alike, usually of some shade of grey or brown, with 

 numerous darker spots and catenulated bands . . Secondly, sexual characters in 

 the male are entirely absent ... " He goes on to say that he has 

 not noticed anything in the natiu-e of seasonal variation in any species within 

 Indian limits. All this is certainly true of the species found in Bombay, which 

 are centaurus and amantes, bazaloides, canaraica and abseus. Of these only 

 two are at all common, namely, centaurus and amantes which, with their trans- 

 formations, are given below. Hewitsmii, which seems to occur sometimes in 

 the Plains, has also been dealt with here. Bazaloides and canaraica are both 



