62 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 



Probably Amauris echeria, a Danaide of wide occurrence in 

 wooded localities, is the best-protected butterfl}' in South Africa, 

 judging from the number of imitators to whom it seems to set the 

 fashion. The most accurate copyist is the female Papilio cenea 

 (type), but the female P. echerio'ides is almost as good; while the 

 males of these species of Papilio are utterly dissimilar both from 

 their respective mates and from each other. Both sexes of 

 P. brasidas present individuals which fairly imitate Echeria,- 

 while among the Nymphalinse an almost exact reproduction 

 occurs in both sexes of Euj^alia mima, and an approximate one 

 in the female of Pseudacraa tarquinia. 



As the case of Papilio cenea presents perhaps the most 

 remarkable mimetic analogy yet recorded among butterflies, and 

 as it has been worked out in South Africa, and is now widely 

 known and quoted, it may be of interest to offer a few remarks 

 upon it. The male of this species is a very fine conspicuous 

 insect, with a peculiar colouring of very pale creamy yellow, with 

 a broad black border to the fore wings, and a black band across 

 the disk of the hind wings, the latter wings bearing each a long 

 broad process or " tail." It is the southern representative of the 

 West African Papilio merope, and was formerly known under that 

 name. Five-and-twenty years ago nobody thought of associating 

 with this beautiful butterfly the altogether different Papilio cenea, 

 which is black, with ochre-yellow patches and spots, and has no 

 tails on the hind wings, and, as mentioned above, is so close a 

 mimicker of Amauris echeria. Yet these strikingly dissimilar 

 insects, when closely examined, exhibited so many points in 

 common, that finding only males of one pattern and only 

 females of the other, and knowing that the two haunted the 

 same woods, and that the conspicuous P. merope had been seen 

 in pursuit of the sombre-tinted P. cenea, I was fully persuaded 

 by the year 1867 that the two were sexes of one and the same 

 kind. More than this, I felt next to certain that two other 

 female Papilios, P. trophonius and P. hippeoon, var., one of which 

 mimics Danais chrysippus and the other Amauris dominicanus, 

 were also females of the same pale yellow tailed male. In the 

 paper dealing with mimetic analogies, which I have already 

 mentioned, I, in 1868, explained at some length the grounds 

 upon which my view of the case was founded ; and, although few 

 naturalists were then disposed to accept it, the truth of what was 



