242 SOUTH-AFRICAX BUTTEKFLIES. 



enclosure, "but tliey were promptly seized by the ever-watchful butcher- 

 bird, Lanius collar is. 



It has been with considerable hesitation that I have separated 

 this Fcqjilio, under Doubleday's name of Lyceus, from the well-known 

 Nireus, Linn., notwithstanding that Doubleday has been followed in 

 this by several authors. There can be no doubt that Linne's original 

 description of Nireus applies to the well-known butterfly from the 

 coast of Western Africa figured by Clerck and Drury, and by Cramer 

 on his Plate 187, ff. A, B.^ The form figured by the latter as the ^ 

 of the Nireus depicted in the plate named — which is itself a ^ — will 

 be found on Plate 378, ff. F, G, and is a rather small $ from South 

 Africa, exhibiting very clearly the differences more or less distinctly 

 presented in specimens inhabiting that part of the continent. These 

 differences are : i °, shorter wings, the fore-wings not so pointed apically, 

 the hind-wings not so produced inferiorly (and with shorter and 

 rounder dentations); 2°, the common stripe decidedly bluer, usually 

 rather broader in fore-wing, and considerably narrower and shorter at 

 its termination in hind-wing (where in Nireus the 'portion between 

 second and first median nervides is much enlarged and elongated, and 

 extends along njyper side of first median nermde considerably beyond the 

 ^portion below that nervtde " — just the reverse of what is seen in Lyoeus) ; 

 3°, the submarginal spots in hind-wing usually larger, more elongate, 

 and more numerous ; and, on the under side of the ^, 4°, the paler 

 hind-wing and apical area of fore-wing, and the presence in both 

 of some broad shining-greyish clouding (wholly wanting in Nireus) ; 

 and 5°, the wider and continuous shining- creamy submarginal stripe 

 (which in Nireus is throughout broken into spots both by nervules and 

 inter-nervular folds). 



The upper-side differences are very constant, and so also is the 

 under-side one of the continuous hind-wing stripe ; but specimens of 

 the $ occur in Natal, Zululand, Transvaal, and especially Delagoa 

 Bay, in which the shining-greyish clouding of the under side is more 

 or less reduced, and sometimes almost obsolete. 



M. C. Oberthiir {Ann. Mus. Civ. di Geneva, xv. p. 147, 1880), 

 while distinguishing between Nireus and Lyceus, and rightly pointing 

 out the application to them respectively of Cramer's different figures, 

 still supposes (as he had previously intimated in his Mudes d'Entomo- 

 logie, liv. iii. p. 13, 1878) that Nireus (Cramer's PI. 187, A, b) is the 

 form spread through all the southern parts of Africa, and that Lyoeus 

 (Cramer's PI. 378 F, g) is peculiar to countries north of the Equator; 

 but, as I have abundantly shown, it is the latter that inhabits all 

 South Africa proper, and as M. Oberthur records that all the Abyssinian 



1 The late Mr. G. R. Gray evidently took the opposite view ; for in both his Britis^h 

 Museum Catalogues of Papilionidae (1852 and 1856) he gave the Linnean Nireus as the 

 Southern form, and proposed the new name of Erinus for the West-Coast one. 



" This character is also prominent in the closely-allied P. Bromius, Doiabl., from West 

 Africa, distinguished from Nireus by its much wider bluish-green stripes. 



