in*.] 180 



insects collected by Mr. C. Hedley during the coral-boring expedition 

 in 1896 to Funafuti in the Ellice Group (Rainbow, Memoirs Austr. 

 Museum, III, part ii, p. 95), there is no mention of the occurrence 

 of D. plexippus, nor is Asclepias curassamca included among the few 

 plants noticed by him or by subsequent visitors as growing on that 

 atoll. It is quite possible that the conditions of these small islands 

 do not favour the growth of the plant. 



III. The Western Pacific, Australia, the 

 Malay Archipelago, &c. 



The very interesting records of Danaida plexippus in the Western 

 Pacific Islands, by my friend Paymaster-in-Chief Gf. F. Mat hew, 

 R.N., nearly thirty years ago, have been included in my previous paper 

 (Ent, Mo. Mag., vol. XXII, pp. 220, 221), and have been supplemented 

 by my own observations made in 1900 in New Caledonia, the New 

 Hebrides, and the Loyalty Islands (7. c, vol. XXXVIII, p. 192, et seq.). 

 I have, however, been unable to collect any information as to the date 

 at which it first made its appearance in any of these island groups ; 

 but it probably reached this region very shortly after its arrival in the 

 Central Pacific. 



In the "Field" of April 16th, 1881 (p. 539), Mr. E. L. Layard 

 fives the following very interesting notes on the butterfly and its food- 

 plant as observed by him at Teremta, a French military post on the 

 west side of New Caledonia, some sixty miles north of Noumea — 

 " A burst of sunshine and we are out on a sandy flat, also evidently 

 subject to frequent overflow of the river .... but now covered with 

 a luxuriant growth of the pest- weed of that country, the " gensdarmes 

 plant " as it is called, second only to the Lantana in its powers of 



expansion and destructiveness Millions of huge red-brown 



butterflies sported among the flowers of this useless plant, their larvae 

 devouring the leaves in spite of the acrid milky sap they contain. It 

 is strange that both plant and insect are introductions, and not 

 natives of the colony. The former, an Asclepiad, is said to have 

 been brought from Tahiti by a gendarme who had stuffed his 

 mattress with the silky cotton of the pods. This he emptied out in 

 his barracks near Noumea, and the few chance seeds clinging to the 

 cotton, finding a suitable soil, established themselves, and have thence 

 spread all over the land. The butterfly (Danais) is an American 

 insect that appeared suddenly in Australia. It was apparently intro- 

 duced here in a case of plants by Pere Montrouzier, the celebrated 



