DISTRIBUTE INSECT VARIETY. 28 1 



Hampshire New Forest in the spring of 1871 were small, pale- 

 coloured, with rounded wings; whereas those I netted on the Superga 

 Hills, near Turin, in 1878, were all large and dai'k, with produced 

 wing-tips. There likewise the Small Copper Butterfly has its wing 

 often suffused with dusky, indicating, as I imagine, a southern 

 distributive limit. Indeed, the plains of Italy prove quite a ti-ans- 

 formation scene to the British collector, and it is here on the limit of 

 the olive zone we find that the ova of our blackthorn-feeding Brim- 

 stone Butterfly, according to Boisduval, produce the rich orange 

 blotched variety Cleopatra, that may be met with at Avignon flying 

 in company with our ordinary February harbinger of the primrose. 

 In America, on the other hand, it has been long known the 

 common Swallow Tail [Papilio Turnus) is variable, with a dark 

 female Glaiicus rarely found north of about forty degrees of 

 latitude. Dr. Jordan further affirms that certain North American 

 Lepidoptera are darker than the European types, citing the 

 Camberwell Beauty^ Painted Lady Butterfly, and Melanij^joe 

 hastata in illustration ; and this is the precise quality in which 

 many other so-called representative species on the two areas differ. 

 For examjile, the Nearctic Deilephila Chaiu/enerii and our own 

 gain, or Fhlogoj:)Jiora Iris and our Angle Shades, among moths ; 

 Vanessa Milbertii and the Small Tortoiseshell (■/. album), and the 

 Large Tortoiseshell [Thanaos briza), and our Dingy Skipper, 

 among butterflies. 



We may also trace in local varieties of butterflies and moths 

 a process of approximation or differentiation of the sexes. Thus 

 the deep black Swallow Tail, Avith blue wing flecks [Pajulio 

 memmon), found in China and the islands of the Pacific, produces 

 in Java a light-coloured variety^ with spoon-shaped tails to its 

 hind wings, they not existing in the ordinary form of this 

 butterfly ; and as regards colour, on the other hand, the common 

 English Ghost Moth, in the crepuscular light of Zetland, assumes 

 the orange markings of the female on its immaculate wings of 

 satiny white, a very remarkable variety, which has been likewise 

 taken by Herr Snellen van Hoeven near Rotterdam. From a 

 note by the late Mr. Hewitson we learn another Swallow Tail 

 [Pajyilio Mero2)e) in Madagascar has a female resembling its male, 

 but that elsewhere the sex is polymorphic, or takes numerous 

 forms. 



