220 THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 



headed toward the north-east, directly against the trades. Although I was 

 familiar with the fact that commonly the Pieridie are the first butterflies 

 with which one meets when approaching land, and had tested the truth of 

 it while nearing the coast of Portugal, and also off the Azores, I did not 

 suppose that they regularly occurred in such abundance as I found them 

 here in the Caribbean. In fact, it had been my experience to only meet 

 with a half-dozen or so when approaching land. But here the steamer 

 continually passed by straggling bunches of them, all flying north-east, out 

 to sea. As we neared the shore, they became more common, and when 

 at last I landed and looked up on the mountain-side above La Guaira, 

 there were thousands of them. The whole mountain-side was thickly 

 dotted with specks of yellow and orange, which kept moving steadily on, 

 in an easterly direction, rarely pausing, following, apparently, the line of 

 the coast, and going in the same general direction from which came the 

 trade winds. 



On the next day, from the car window of the little train which runs 

 from La Guaira to Caracas, over a roadbed from which are obtained 

 glimpses of great gorges filled with tropical vegetation, as well as of the 

 parched and barren mountain-sides, destitute of life save for a few gaunt 

 post-cacti and scraggy thorn bushes, I saw thousands of butterflies of this 

 group, all moving steadily, like the waters of a great river, toward the 

 east. In many cases I thought I saw the insects flying in another 

 direction. Often I was sure some were flying west, but on taking my 

 bearings I invariably found that my calculations were at fault, and that all 

 the butterflies were moving east. There is, perhaps, no railroad in the 

 world on which a man is so often at a loss to know just where are the 

 cardinal points of the compass. The sun gives no clue during the hotter 

 hours, at the season when I was there, as it is practically in the middle 

 of the sky; and the whole journey is simply a succession of curves, this 

 way and that, so confusing that many times I could not realize the 

 compass had not succeeded in some way in getting out of order and 

 reversing, or at least seriously changing its position with respect to the 

 magnetic pole. Over the mountain-sides and across the valleys Pieridjs 

 could be seen, always near the ground, yet rarely alighting, and invariably 

 travelling eastward. 



While at Caracas I made many excursions into the surrounding 

 country for butterflies, and from the hilltops there I could watch the steady 

 migration, although here the numbers were very much less than at La 

 Guaira, 



