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STRAY NOTES ON LEPIDOPTERA. 



By A. Sidney Olliff, 

 Government Entomologist, New South Wales. 



No. 2. 



A short time ago, Mr. Lionel de Niceville, the author of that 

 admirable handbook " The Butterflies of India, Burmah, and 

 Ceylon," in offering some friendly criticism of my small pamphlet 

 on Australian Butterflies,* published by the Natural History 

 Association (now the the Field Naturalists' Society) of New 

 South Wales, and originally written for a weekly newspaper, 

 suggested to me that the butterfly which, for many years past, 

 has been known in our local collections as Libythea myrrha, 

 Godart, was in reality quite distinct from that species. Mr. de 

 Niceville, I believe, arrived at this conclusion from a comparison 

 of the rough but characteristic figure of the Australian insect, 

 contained in the pamphlet in question, with typical specimens of 

 L. myrrha ; and I must confess that the suggestion did not cause 

 me much surprise, as I had noticed some months previously, when 

 examining a series of Libythecv from New Guinea, that certain 

 specimens from Port Moresby, although agreeing in every particular 

 with the Australian species, exhibited certain marked differences 

 from the true L. myrrha. The genus Libythea appears to have 

 been first recorded as belonging to the Australian fauna by Sir 

 William Macleay, who called attention to the presence of a species 

 of the genus (referring to the insect as Libythea myrrha) in a 

 small collection of Cape York lepidoptera exhibited at a meeting 

 of the Entomological Society of New South Wales in September, 



* "Australian Butterflies : a Brief Account of the Native Families, &c." 

 Sydney, 1889. 



