MIMICRY IN CEYLON BUTTERFLIES. 13 
taken before the supposedly palatable Junonia iphita of not very 
‘dissimilar colouration. Nor was any hesitation manifested towards 
Papilio aristolochie with its postulated evil taste and marked 
warning colouration. 
As P. aristolochie has been regarded from the nature of its food 
‘plant as one of the most unpalatable of all the Ceylon butterflies, 
I may mention another experiment which was made in connection 
with its larva. In a cage containing two specimens of the lizard 
Lyriocephalus I placed four full-grown larvee of P. artstolochie, an 
imago each of Danais chrysippus and D. plexippus, together with 
some twenty grasshoppers. They were all introduced one evening, 
and on examining the contents of the cage next morning | found 
that the lizards had eaten several of the grasshoppers, the specimen 
of D. plexippus, and two of the P. aristolochie larve, and this in 
spite of the marked black, white, and red warning colouration of 
the latter. The remaining two larve had crawled to the top of the 
cage out of harm’s way. | 
From such experiments as these one can hardly fail to draw the 
conclusion that Calotes as well as Lyriocephalus will readily eat 
anything in the way of butterflies that they come across. Nor is 
“this surprising, in view of the fact that such noxious creatures as 
the large red ant (Hcophylla smargdina) and hairy caterpillars 
constitute a considerable proportion of the contents of their 
stomachs. They certainly do not appear to exercise that nice 
discrimination with regard to butterflies, which is necessary for the 
establishment of mimicking forms on the theory of natural selection. 
And here I may call attention to the series of experiments by Finn, 
as the result of which that author was led to a similar conclusion. 
The experiments were made both with lizards in captivity and with 
lizards at liberty, and the author sums up his impressions in the 
following sentence: ‘‘The behaviour of these reptiles certainly 
does not appear to afford support to the belief that the butterflies, 
at any rate, usually considered nauseous, are distasteful to them.* 
(C) Diptera.—The large predaceous flies of the family Asilidz are 
among the chief enemies of butterflies in Ceylon, and in places 
where they are numerous it is a common sight to see one of them 
carrying some butterfly whose juices it is busily engaged in sucking. 
To my friend Mr. C. C. Dobell I owe the first instance with which I 
met of one of these flies attacking a butterfly. At Anuradhapura 


* Finn, F.—Contributions to the Theory of Warning Colours and Mimicry, 
No. II. Experiments with a lizard (Calotes versicolor).—Journ. Roy. Asiat. 
Soc., Bengal, vol. LXV., 1897. 
In a paper published in the Biological Bulletin, 1903, Miss A. H. Pritchett 
gives an account of some experiments with the lizard Sceloporus floridanus. 
This species took the so-called distasteful models Anosia plexippus and Papilio 
philenor ‘‘ with evident relish,” and other brightly coloured forms were also 
eaten readily. As the result of her experiments Miss Pritchett concludes that 
lizards show no preference, but eat Lepidoptera indiscriminately. 
