226 [September, 



States Eclipse expedition of 1889, at the Azores, numbered among 

 them two specimens of this butterfly. There were only about a dozen 

 specimens of insects taken at the Azores by the industrious naturalists 

 of the party, and I judge that it must be common there. Why we 

 have not heard of its domiciliation on the African continent is a 

 mystery to me. It will no doubt get there before long." It is not, 

 however, enumerated in the list of species of Lepidoptera met with in 

 the Azores by Dr. Ernst Hartert and Mr. W. R. Ogilvie-Grant in 

 March and April, 1903 (Warren, Novitates Zoologicse, vol. XIII, 

 pp. 439-447), and is probably little more than a casual wanderer to 

 these Islands ; neither is Asclepias curassavica included in Mr. H. C. 

 Watson's catalogue of the Azorean plants in Mr. Godman's book, though 

 he notes (pp. 194-5) A. (Gomphocarpus) fruticosa, L., from Eayal, but 

 as " only a casual escape from gardens." 



At the present time the Canary Islands are the head-quarters 

 of the butterfly in the Eastern Atlantic region, though I have not 

 been able to ascertain the exact time at which it first reached these 

 islands, or at any rate was first observed there. I had no record 

 of its occurrence in the Canaries in my former paper (1886), but my 

 friend Prof. Poulton writes (Bedrock, April, 1914, p. 42, footnote) — 

 " I saw it myself in Grand Canary in 1888," and in February, 1889, 

 I was shown at Gibraltar several specimens that had been taken in 

 Teneriffe only a short time previously. It would appear, as well as its 

 food-plant, to have increased and multiplied rapidly since that time, 

 for in 1894 we find Mrs. A. E. Holt- White (The Butterflies and Moths 

 of Teneriffe, pp. 44-46) writing as follows — " The larva .... lives 

 and feeds gregariously on the ' Arbol de Seda ' (silk-tree, Asclepias 

 curassavica) , a plant bearing a very bright red and gold flower .... 

 A brood seems to emerge about every three months in most years 

 from February to September. The butterfly frequents flower-gardens 

 and fields near the coast, not often being found more than seven or 

 eight hundred feet above the sea." Subsequent records from the 

 Canaries agree as to its now being one of the common butterflies of 

 the Islands, and Mr. A. E. Elliott (Ent. Mo. Mag., vol. XXXVIII, 

 p. 131) notes it as being "fairly common and widely distributed" in 

 the winter months of 1901-2. 



I can find no record of the occurrence of Danaida pfexippus in 

 Madeira, though as long ago as 1885 I was shown in an English 

 greenhouse a vigorous plant of Asclepias curassavica which had been 

 brought from that island. 



