A TRAMP ACROSS CORSICA. 



141 



underside, the dark band common to all the "tortoiseshell" forms of 

 Vanessids may be found. Together with these very dark forms and 

 under the same temperature conditions (warm days and cool nights),! 

 reared three large sized female aberrations (pupal life 11-14 days) 

 which exhibited the exactly opposite tendency to develop very light 

 colours. One emerged on the 10th August and two came out on the 

 24th. In all three the ground colour is a clear cinnamon-tinted orange 

 (showing up conspicuously also in the centre of the ocellus in the fore- 

 wings), there is an unusual amount of yellow along the costa, and the 

 ocelli of all the wings are sufiused with light violet, ab. dara-riolacea. 

 In the coming season Vanesm io promises in this district (Munden, 

 Ware, Herts) to be as common as it was last summer, if it be possible 

 to judge by the number of hybernated specimens which may be now 

 seen during a short walk in fine weather. On April 20th I saw two 

 pairs of Vanessa io bufieting each other in the air over a spot at which 

 evidently they had established themselves. The specimens settled 

 repeatedly in damp places in the road and allowed me to approach my 

 face to within half a yard of them. 1 noticed one clean or scratch its 

 head with its right leg very energetically, and it repeatedly tapped the 

 earth with a rapid movement of both antennte — the yellow-tipped 

 "clubs" touching the ground simultaneously — before unrolling its 

 proboscis to suck up the moisture. The females evidently had not yet 

 deposited their eggs. Finally three of the specimens were in excep- 

 tionally good condition, and one of the males exhibited the blue-banded 

 perfect type of forewing ocellus, but the ocellus of the hindwings was 

 nearly black, containing only five separate violet-blue spots. Specimens 

 with a perfectly clear, bright blue hindwing ocellus, crossed once only 

 by a deep black bar and short black projection without any other black 

 suffusion (ab. luridocellata) seem to be rare in the field. Even among 

 the more than two thousand specimens which I bred and examined 

 last August, there were not many complete specimens of this kind. 



A Tramp Across Corsica. 



By p. a. H. MUSCHAMP, F.E.S. 

 Seven years ago I passed my Easter holidays in Corsica and was so 

 enchanted with the perfume of the "maquis," and with the simple 

 hospitality of the good people, that I have often wished to pay a 

 second visit to the "island of unrest." As nothing hindered me from 

 spending my short Easter holiday wherever I might feel inclined in 

 this year of grace, I found my way to Bastia by way of Leghorn and 

 decided to use shanks's mare as a substitute for the little yellow 

 Corsican pony that had consented to trot me over the country on my 

 last visit. As the weather was not yet warm enough to admit of my 

 going off inland — for inland means highland — and as one cannot very 

 well walk where there is a train running by one's side, my young 

 companion and I took the train as far as it goes along the coastline 

 towards the south, to a little village called Ghisonaccia, just fifty miles 

 from liastia, where we lunched and then started off on our tramp. 

 Corsica is so very thinly populated that one has to be very careful not 

 to aim at a too distant village, for though quite sure of a most 

 hearty welcome anywhere, villages are very few and far between, and 

 it is unusual to find any roof tree between one village and the next. 



