212 THE BUTTERFLIES OF NEW ENGLAND. 



ing, is so prolific in butterflies that, as Wallace says, "we may consider it 

 the headquarters of South American Lepidoptera." The other subfamilies 

 of the Nymphalidae are very wide spread, and in general form the bulk of 

 the butterfly fauna of temperate regions. The Libytheinae, however, are 

 exceedingly poverty stricken in numbers, forming less than three-tenths of 

 one per cent of all the Nymphalidae, but yet are distributed quite around 

 the world, though generally confined to subtropical regions, extending, 

 says Wallace, "on all sides in an erratic manner, into vai'ious remote and 

 disconnected portions of the globe." 



The most striking general feature in the distribution of the larger groups, 

 however, is the almost exclusive restriction of the subfamily of Lemoniinae 

 to tropical America, quite as prominent a fact as the similar limitation of 

 humming-birds to the same region. The species of humming-birds are 

 the smallest of their class and number nearly four hundred, or about four 

 per cent of the known birds ; they are exclusively American, and more 

 than ninety per cent of them are confined to the tropics. The Lemoniinae 

 are among the smallest of butterflies and number nearly eight hundred 

 species, or about ten per cent of the known butterflies ; of these only thirty 

 species, or less than four-tenths of one per cent of the family are found in 

 the Old World, and of the American species ninety-seven per cent are 

 confined to the tropics. Only six humming-birds, and similarly but seven 

 Lemoniinae, are known within the limits of the United States. 



The Lycaeninae, which comprise nearly two-thirds of the members of 

 the family of Lycaenidae, occur everywhere, but certain members of the 

 same, such as the Theclidi, are found in infinitely greater abundance in the 

 New World, especially in South America, than anywhere else. Among 

 the Papilionidae, the Pierinae have about the same numerical relation to 

 the Papilioninae that the Lycaeninae have to the Lycaenidae. They are 

 about equally distributed between the Old and the New Worlds, and are 

 well represented in temperate climes, as well as in equatorial regions. 

 The Papilioninae on the other hand are more strictly equatorial, follomng 

 this belt around the world. Less attention has been paid to the Hes- 

 peridae than to the other families and their numbers are perhaps far greater 

 than we imagine. They swarm in the tropics, and a very considerable 

 number are found in temperate regions of America, where indeed they 

 form a very marked feature of the butterfly fauna, which is by no means 

 the case to the same extent in the Old World. The highest family, or 

 brush-footed butterflies, is, as we have seen, more numerous than any of 

 the others, and though, like the others, it reaches its maximum of develop- 

 ment within the tropics, its numerical superiority is most evident in temper- 

 ate zones, and especially in the north temperate region of the Old World, 

 where its numbers equal those of all the other families combined. 



Many attempts have been made to divide the world into zoological 



