THE COTTESWOLD ARION. 177 



short series from these very Cotteswolds collected by the late 

 Herbert Goss. They are nearly all dull in colour and below 

 normal size — one or two quite small — and I have not come across 

 any such in the many haunts of ario)i abroad which I have 

 visited. I find that they were collected on or very near to 

 the ground more particularly indicated to me by Mr. Bethune- 

 Baker, and at a considerable distance from the locality under 

 review. The arion we took on June 27th are quite up to normal 

 English size, and are no les-s brightly coloured than many from 

 Digne, and comparatively low altitudes off the chalk elsewhere : 

 slaty, but not dull. Under more favourable weather conditions 

 I have no doubt we should have found the species not uncommon, 

 for Mr. Clutterbuck had been on the look out a week previous, 

 and I saw his captures still on the setting-boards. 



The only other blues observed here were belated PoU/ommatus 

 icarus— hardly of the second emergence I suppose, though they 

 were quite fresh, and Cupido minimus — by far the commonest of 

 the three. 



The mystery of the life-history of arion has now been cleared 

 up in its essential details. Those interested in the phenology of 

 the Gloucestershire form maybe referred to the records given by 

 Mr. Clutterbuck in his note on "The Large Blue Butterfly 

 {Lyccena arion) on the Cotteswold Hills " (' Proc. Cotteswold Nat. 

 F.C.,' vol. xviii (2)), read April 1st, 1913. They are, I think, 

 independent of and supplementary to the dates set out in Tutt's 

 * British Butterflies ' (vol. iv, pp. 345-6), in which work, I 

 observe, the hills are spelt " Cotswolds " throughout, and a 

 decided query raised as to the food-plant of the larva consisting 

 of any other plant than TJtymus aerpijllum. 



Sand apparently confused the larva of L. alcon and L. arion, 

 if he ever had any personal knowledge of either at all, when he 

 gave " chenille en juin dans les fleurs de *' Gentiana crucinta.'' 

 Quaedvlieg's " leguminosse," quoted by M.C.Friornnet ('LesEtats 

 des Lepidopteres fran^ais, p. 182) appears to be an even 

 wilder guess on the assumption that other Lycaenids affect 

 those plants, while the authority for Origanum, questioned by 

 Mr. Wheeler in Tutt's work (loc. ciL, p. 340), appears not to be 

 M. Kondou, but Mr. Bromilow, with whom I had some corre- 

 spondence in the early " nineties," and who was then collecting in 

 south of France. A.11 he says, however, in his ' Butterflies of 

 the Eiviera' (p. 48), is that "the females, especially, swarmed 

 on the flowers of Origanum vulgare (Wild M[arjoram), to all 

 appearance laying eggs." (The italics are mine.) Here, at any 

 rate, he does not say that he saw the eggs laid. As a crowning 

 error of transcription, Eiihl (' Die. Pal. Grosse Schmetterlinge,' 

 Bd. i, p. 307) easily comes in first. His locality, " South Devon, 

 bei Huddersfield," must have caused considerable amusement to 

 Mr. G. T. Porritt, who had contributed some notes on arion to 



