334 LEPIDOPTERA. 



cilia white faintly tinged witli brown. Female mucli stouter, 

 antennte threadlike, fore wings often suffused with deeper 

 brown, or else uniformly of the ordinary brown without a 

 darker central band ; hind wings white, usually clouded in 

 some degree with light brown along the hind margin. 



Underside of the fore wings dull pale smoky-brown, 

 shading off to white in the middle and the dorsal margin ; 

 hind wings white dusted along the costal region with brown ; 

 body whitish-brown ; legs and leg-tufts dull umbreous, the 

 former barred with paler. 



Not a very variable species inland, but on the coast, and 

 especially on the western coasts, it is quite otherwise. The 

 range of ground colour there is from the palest drab or even 

 brownish white marbled with pale brown, to blackish-umbreous 

 with or without central blacker markings ; the central black 

 bar above the dorsal margin is usually faint or even absent in 

 the palest forms, yet occasionally large and strongly marked ; 

 in the darkest it sometimes becomes a black rectangular 

 blotch. It is curious that these extreme forms occur together 

 — the whitest and blackest that I have met with were found 

 on the Pembrokeshire coast. In the South of Ireland a more 

 uniformly dark race is accompanied by normal specimens and 

 also by a curiously mealy-looking, grey-brown variety, and in 

 the female by deep umbreous forms. One which I took many 

 years ago on the Irish coast is of a smooth uniform dark 

 brown without mottling of either paler or darker, but with 

 the stigmata and subterminal line tinged with yellow, and 

 has a very unusual aspect. In all these variations the colour 

 of the thorax coincides with that of the fore wings. In Mr. 

 R. Adkins' collection are two female specimens — also from 

 Ireland — in which the fore wings are singularly striped 

 between the nervures with yellow ; Mr. G. T. Porritt has a 

 male the fore wings of which are wholly brownish-ochreous, 

 the markings only faintly deeper yellow-brown ; and another 

 of the usual pale umbreous, but with the hind margin black- 

 brown ; and in Mr. E. A. Atmore's collection is a female of 



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