BUTTERFLIES OF CANTAL AND LOZERE. 299 
Here also were the prickly blue thistles to lend a decidedly 
meridional touch of colour among the lavender ; while the 
scanty hedges which divide the cultivated lucerne and sainfoin 
fields of the main valley of the Lot from the stony approaches 
to the Causse were hung with scented clematis, with a dense 
underwood of wild gooseberries, exuberant of thorns, but jewelled 
with tiny luscious gold and crimson fruits—welcome dessert to 
the al fresco luncheon in a land where no water is to be found. 
The butterflies about were largely composed of Satyride ; Satyrus 
alcyone perhaps the most in evidence, but Hipparchia semele and 
circe running it close in point of numbers. S. hermione was 
hardly less abundant with briseis, chiefly males, and just coming 
on in full force. But for sheer beauty of colour they had no 
chance with Pyrameis atalanta and P. cardui, whose folded wings 
as they banqueted blended in perfect harmony with the delicate 
pearly greys and lilac shadow of the lavender. 
On this well-remembered ground nothing is more curious 
than the extraordinary localization of species. I recall having 
taken ‘J'hymelicus act@on in 1901 at a certain corner where 
there was a little waste of scrub and rushes. The bushes had 
grown considerably, but the intervening spaces provided me with 
half a dozen examples or so, and precisely the same rule ap- 
peared to govern the limitations of Polyommatus dolus, for neither 
was to be taken, now or then, outside these curiously restricted 
areas, though by walking the whole way to Balsiege along the 
Causse I struck several colonies of the lovely and little-known 
“blue,” which, taking the form var. vittata, Oberth., and extend- 
ing from the Atlantic slope of the Lozere Mountains, seems, at 
Ytrac and Aurillac, in the valley of the Cére, to reach its north- 
western limit in France, though the discovery of the species at 
Aguessac (Aveyron) by M. René Oberthur’s collector may con- 
tinue the ‘‘life-line,” so to speak, further south-west than at 
present suspected. The first day I was on the dolus ground at 
Balsiége—a dry torrent-bed, filled with lavender, white melilot, 
wild mallow, and other herbs, about half a mile towards Mende 
from the village—I arrived at noon, but the sky was temporarily 
clouded, with high wind, and it was not until four o’clock that 
I suddenly espied a wasted male flitting in company with some 
beautifully fresh P. corydon, ab. aurantia, to which, on the wing, 
it bears a close resemblance. Tvidently 1 was too late by a good 
ten days, and of the eight or nine males selected but two have 
attained to ‘‘cabinet rank”! As for the females, to separate 
. the which from P. damon is a standing entomological puzzle, 
not one could I discover. Yet one would have expected a few 
surviving with the last of the males, for they were flying here 
nine years ago in profusion. In vain I searched the scanty 
sainfoin patches which are its habitat. I could find only males 
of P. damon, with occasional flashes of P. hylas, surely one of 
