1902 Butte7'fly-Htinting in the Alps 85 



The mountain fauna of the United Kingdom is compara- 

 tively Hmited, and species which are common enough in the 

 lowlands are not represented at any altitude, as in the Alps. 

 For instance, the familiar Brimstone of the hedgerows I 

 have seen careering wildly over the moraine at 8000 feet, 

 miles away from his native buckthorn, if, indeed, the larva 

 of the alpine Brimstone feeds on buckthorn at all. The 

 Swallow-tail of the Cambridgeshire fens, never, to my know- 

 ledge, reported from the mountains of Great Britain, is also 

 a familiar and welcome object by the roadside among the 

 great cow-parsnips and umbelliferous undergrowth, and it 

 continues to within a very short distance of the snow-line. 

 The Highlands of Scotland are notoriously poor in butter- 

 flies, — remember I am speaking of htitterflies only, — so are 

 the mountains of Wales, Ireland, and the Lake Country. 

 We have but one truly alpine representative of the great 

 " Ringlet " family, Erebia epiphron, var. cassiope. The moun- 

 tains of Europe between them can show some three-and- 

 thirty, with power to add to their number, and an incredible 

 range of varieties. Again, I have found insects like the 

 Queen of Spain Fritillary (Argynnis lathonia) flying over the 

 ice and snow below the Mountet hut (9495 feet) at Zinal, 

 and you certainly do not expect to find our May and June 

 Orange Tips thousands of feet above the sea-level in August. 

 The tremendous strength of the seemingly fragile butterfly's 

 wing has often revealed itself to me on the higher mountain 

 climbs ; but, as British collectors have so far confined their 

 inventiveness to labelling only their own butterflies with 

 English names, I shall have to use the far more beautiful 

 if seldom appropriate titles bestowed by scientists upon 

 species which occur in the mountains and elsewhere across 

 the seas. Our familiar friend the Small Tortoiseshell 

 {Vanessa urticcB), the first of hybernated butterflies, as a rule, 

 to put in an appearance, and very often the last to go, is a 

 tremendous climber. In the Alps, while varying little in 

 size, the wings are certainly of a more brilliant orange-red, 

 and the black patches and spots, with the little blue border 

 on the lower wings, are intensified in a way sometimes seen 

 in specimens from the Scottish moors. Ice and snow, mist 

 and sterile crag, have no terrors for him. I have watched 



