106 



IV. On the Species of Helicopis inhabiting the 

 Valley of the Amazon 



BY AUG. E. GROTE. 



[Read before tJiis Society, March 6, 1874.] 



More than one hundred and seventy years ago the earliest 

 known species of the singular and beautiful genus Helicopis was 

 observed by Madam Merian, and figures of this species, the Heli- 

 copis Cupido {Linn.), are given in her work on the Insects of 

 Surinam. A second species, Helicopis Acis, is described by 

 Fabricius, in 1781, from Brazil. A third, Helicopis Endymion, is 

 indicated by Cramer, in 1783, from Surinam, and re-described by 

 Dr. Felder in 1865, as cited by W. F. Kirby in 1871, in whose 

 Catalogue the genus Helicopis {Fahr., 1807) is credited with the 

 three species above mentioned. 



Madam Merian observed the larva of H. Cupido, feeding on the 

 cotton plant, and gives three figures of the insect' in her, critically 

 speaking, admirable work. The figure of the caterpillar reminds 

 one curiously of that of Aletia argillacea {Anomis xylina) observed 

 in the Southern States. 



Of all the older writers on Entomology, it is Madam Merian 

 that affects us most. Her occupation in 1699 and 1700, in Surinam, 

 and before that as far back as 1679, in Europe, might seem a 

 strange one, alike for the times she lived in and for her sex. 

 Charles the Second was King of England; but in the United 

 Netherlands science had commenced an early bloom. Five Uni- 

 versities had been founded between 1557 and 1648, and while the 

 close of the Thirty Years War found Germany prostrated, the 

 States General had encouraged the study of Natural History and 

 were ^listening to Schwammerdan and Spinoza and looking 



1 "Haec die 9. Junii in nympliam transformata, exin die 24. Julii facta est papllio, argenteis 

 pnniceisque macnlis superbiens." Menan I. c. 



