262 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, 1890. 



have agreed to publish our notes. We are fully conscious of their 

 leanness, hut cannot help it. Observations begun and ended in one 

 season must be crude, and notes jotted down in the midst of red-tape, 

 fuchsine and foolscap must be arid. But the conditions of life in 

 India are such that, if a thing is not done note, it stands little chance 

 of being done at all. We can only ask our readers to " keep kind."'' 

 With the view, however, of making this paper as complete as we 

 can, we have added a number of species which we have., at some time 

 or other, reared in other parts of India ; but we have inserted nothing 

 on the authority of others. < >i course, many of the species here 

 described have been described before ; but in the first place these 

 descriptions are often not easily available, in the second place 

 caterpillars vary a good deal in different localities and the published 

 descriptions do not always accord with our observations, and in the 

 last place, Indian entomology has not yet got beyond the stage at 

 which cumulative and corroborative evidence is of value. 



A few words on the study of larva\ We wish it were more in 

 favour than it is. It need scarcely be ,said that the classification 

 of butterflies can never be put on a sound basis without a knowledge 

 of them in all their stages. There are also many curious questions, 

 which puzzle every collector, which can never be answered except 

 by rearing from the egg ; the unexplained fact, for example, that 

 the females of some species are so scarce and the males so plentiful. 

 In some cases this is explained, partially at' least, by a difference in 

 the habits of the two sexes. In the genera Charaxes and Apatura 

 the males bask on high trees during the hottest hours of the day, 

 and may always be found by one who knows where to look for 

 them : the females do not bask, and the one who knows where to look 

 for them is yet unborn. But other cases cannot be so explained. 

 Of Papilio tamilana last season we caught fifty males and one broken 

 female. Our observations have been too limited to allow us to 

 generalise with safety, but we are inclined to think that in some 

 species many more males than females are produced. Out of a 

 large number of larvae of EuthaKa hibentina only a few female 

 butterflies were obtained: in E. garuda there was no such disparity. 

 In the case of P. polymnestor about two-thirds were males. Experi- 

 ments on a large scale with one or two species would clear up this 



