NOTES, CAPTURES, ETC. 153 
after, but what to feed them on was the rub. Having given a 
history before in your pages as far as I then knew, I can only add 
that the young larvee seemed to take best, before hybernation, to a 
small flowering moss that grows by the side of wet rills. One 
changed in October, and another grew half an inch long; the 
others only about one-fourth of an inch, and since then they 
have not been seen. I expect them to creep up now shortly. 
As the larva is not known to any one, I purpose, if any more 
grow up, to get a correct drawing made for your magazine, for it 
will then be seen by the many, and not locked up from the world. 
My visits after this were chiefly larva-hunting, up to the end of 
October, among the Hypericum. In the wet woods Nepticula 
septembrella was in nearly every leaf. Several journeys I made 
looking for fresh localities for the balsam; but last year, through 
some cause or other, the plant was a failure. It was suggested 
to me by a botanist that the weather was so cold in the autumn 
of 1877 that the seed never got ripe: be that as it may, I had 
over seven hundred miles of rambles in one fortnight to no 
purpose at all. Ihad got a few larve, but their number and 
Species are soon gone through; and I suppose I have now the 
results to bear of my larva-hunting in the Lake District, where 
fog and rain in the autumn months prevail, by being confined to 
my house for the last ten weeks with rheumatism. 
Beech House, Dutton, Ribchester, Lancashire, 
April 12, 1879. 
ENTOMOLOGICAL NOTES, CAPTURES, &c. 
NoTES ON THE GENUS ARGyNNIS.—In Edwards’ ‘ Butterflies 
of North America, three species of the genus Argynnis are 
figured, in which the male is of the ordinary fulvous and black 
colour of the genus, but the female approaches more nearly to 
the colour of Argynnis Paphia, variety Valezina. ‘The species in 
question are 4. Diana, A. Nokomis, and A. Leto. At the end of the 
author’s description of the last-mentioned, he states: “The contrast 
between the sexes in this species is of the same nature as in 
Diana and Nokomis, and it is a very curious problem how the 
sexes in these species have come to differ so remarkably, when in 
nearly every other member of the extensive genus Argynnis they 
are essentially alike.” As to the cause of Melanism I am not 
53 
