412 TACKARD— ORIGIN OF MARKINGS OF ORGANISMS. [Dec. 2. 



Mr. A. G. Butler^ states that an entomologist in Bombay had 

 informed him " that the Charaxes psapJion of Westvvood was con- 

 tinually persecuted by the bulbul, so that he rarely captured a 

 specimen of this species which had not a piece snipped out of the 

 hind wing ; he offered one to a bulbul in a cage, and it was greedily 

 devoured, whilst it was only by repeated persecution that he 

 succeeded in inducing the bird to touch a Danais, which he offered 

 to it." 



In his article " Mimetisme," Piepers refers to his experience dur- 

 ing twenty-nine years spent in Java. 



"■ One day when a Euplcea rafflesii Moore, i.e., a Danaid reputed 

 to be inedible, was disclosed in my garden where several of the 

 caterpillars of this species had lived, I saw a bird (Edolius ?) seize 

 and eat it ; the next day another shared the same fate. Twice also 

 have I seen a sparrow attack 2a\ A7?iathusia phidippiisY,.''^ These 

 large butterflies, though Rhopalocera, only fly at twilight, and the 

 one attacked had taken refuge on a whitewashed wall. '^ These 

 four cases are the only ones during the twenty-eight years of my 

 sojourn in the Indies where I have seen birds attack any butterflies. 

 And even to justify the fact in question it is not enough that here 

 and there a butterfly is eaten by birds, but there should be a chase 

 of this kind so general and common that the existence of unpro- 

 tected species should be endangered, and that an evolution like 

 their assumed mimicry should become of great utility. Moreover 

 the same thing occurs in other regions. Pryer has never seen an 

 instance during twenty years entomologizing in Borneo, nor 

 Skertchley during thirty years of observation in Europe, in Asia, in 

 Africa and in America. According to this last the celebrated ento- 

 mologist Scudder would not credit this fact. In the session of the 

 London Society named below, held May 3, 1869, Home enumerated 

 a number of insects which he had seen in India devoured by sev- 

 eral kinds of animals ; among these insects he mentioned moths but 

 no butterflies. Here in Holland it is also the same thing. 

 According io observations published in 1890 by Butler, a small 

 English bird, also found with us in captivity, devoured with apparent 

 relish hundreds of Pieris brassicos and P. napi, but it is not observed 

 here that the birds chase these butterflies, although they are very 

 common. Moreover as to England, Jordan has at times seen a cer- 

 tain small insectivorous bird seize a butterfly, but Butler states that 



1 Nature^ III, p. 165. 



