1 66 ■ LEPIDOPTERA. 



cilia yellow. Hiad wings pale grey, shading into pale 

 reddish at the apex and the costal and dorsal margins ; 

 cilia light red. 



Under side of the male with all the wings dark smoky, 

 their margins red ; cilia paler or whitish ; body smoky brown ; 

 legs red, the third pair being rather short, though complete, 

 but with the tibia3 thickened and bearing great tufts or 

 fascicles of long yellow hair-like scales which spread out like 

 a hollow fan. Under side of the female similar, except that 

 the legs are devoid of any extraneous ornament ; the thorax 

 is yellow, and the abdomen testaceous, and hardly furnished 

 with any scales. 



Usually the male is very constant in colour, except in the 

 front of the thorax, which varies as already stated, and 

 occasionally becomes dark brown or red, while in rare instances 

 the whole of the back of the thorax is reddish. There is 

 also a tendency in very fresh specimens to redness of the cilia 

 and edges, and in one which I took in Pembrokeshire, almost 

 one-third of the fore wings from the apex was tinged with 

 delicate pink, but this rapidly faded and soon disappeared, 

 as also does the pink of the cilia in time. The female, while 

 always preserving the general pattern of markings as described, 

 varies, in almost every individual, in their extent of develop- 

 ment or of suppression. Sometimes they almost totally 

 disappear, and, very rarely, the dull red is exchanged for 

 brown. 



From the Shetland Isles, however, are obtained aberrant 

 forms of a character hitherto ob'served nowhere else. Along 

 with perfectly normal specimens are others — of the male 

 sex — in which the female colouring of the fore wings and, to 

 some extent, the female markings are assumed ; or the white 

 male colouring is retained, with the addition of some of these 

 markings in grey, reddish-grey, or reddish-brown ; or colour 

 and markings are partially obscured by an extensive clouding 

 of dull smoky. Almost every possible intermediate gradation 

 in the form and extent of the markings and in shades of 



