Feb., 1 Waterhouse AND Lyell, A New Butterfly. i 57 



from 30th October to 5th December, and easily determined it 

 as an undescribed species. 



The ova and larvae were taken to Sydney and there watched 

 carefully. The former hatched on loth November and were 

 at once provided with young Acacia pycnantha and eucalyptus 

 foliage, but we could not induce them to eat either. Once we 

 found them feeding upon slices of apple introduced in the 

 breeding cage for the captive ants,' but they did not thrive. 

 We tried transferring some of them to a nest of /. nitidus in 

 the open, but our efforts were resultless ; we were not successful 

 in keeping them till the first moult. 



We had better fortune with the twenty well-grown larvae 

 taken from the ants' nests at Ocean Grove. These would not 

 touch the eucalypt, and fed but very sparingly upon the A. 

 pycnantha, but they appeared to be fond of the apple. They 

 pupated during November and the butterflies emerged from 

 the 29th November to the i8th December. 



Mr. Davey suggests that the ants feed the butterfly larvae. 

 In view of the distance many of the eggs were deposited from 

 what appeared to be the foodplant, this seems feasible. The 

 ants were continually running over the larvae and cleaning 

 them, but though we watched carefully for the feeding process 

 we did not succeed in observing it. The small amount of 

 apple, and the very small surface of A. pycnantha leaf eaten, 

 seemed to be totally inadequate for the larvae, if we might 

 judge from the quantities of the same foods consumed in an 

 adjoining breeding cage by the larvae of M. ignita. Had the 

 food supply been deficient, a proportion at least of dwarf 

 imagines should have resulted : except for the few preserved 

 for cabinet specimens, all twenty larvae pupated : each one of 

 these produced an imago and not one of these was of less than 

 average size. The butterflies, both captured and bred from the 

 pupae, are very constant in size, so even a slight decrease of 

 size in a series such as this would be easily noticeable. 



Before describing the new species, the following life history 

 notes appear worthy of record. 



Ovum. White : height twothirds that of width : densely 

 and very finely pitted : micropyle about onequarter the 

 diameter of the egg. One patch of ova contained 35 deposited 

 close together, and 13 others at a distance of about one inch. 

 Other i^atches contained about the same number, so we con- 

 cluded the 48 ova were deposited by the one female. 



Larva. When freshly emerged these are pale cream in 

 colour, with a l)lack head and without visible markings. In 

 the last instar they are of a general brownish colour with brown 

 head : the dorsal surface is covered with a series of somewhat 

 indefinite truncated whitish triangles narrowing towards the 



