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XVI. The ButUrfiies of Chile. By Hexry John 

 Elwes, F.R.S., F.L.S., etc. 



[Read June 4tli, 1902.] 



Plates XII, XIII, XIY, and XV. 



Our pre.sent knowledge of the butterflies of Chile consists 

 almost entirely of bare descriptions published by authors 

 who had little knowledge of the country or of the climatic 

 conditions wdiich have tended to make the fauna of this 

 country so interesting and peculiar. 



GvJrin in the ' Voyage de la Coquille,' pubhshed in 1832, 

 was the first entomologist who seems to have received any 

 butterflies from Chile, except a few of the very common- 

 est, which Molina, Drury, and Hiibner had already 

 described. 



Blanchard in Gay's ' Fauna Chilena,' published in 1852, 

 has described and figured more of the commoner ones. 



Philippi has described others in ' Linnsea Entomologica ' 

 in 1860, but though an excellent botanist he has paid 

 little attention to the Lepidoptera of his adopted country. 



Reed, an English naturalist long resident in Chile, 

 published in 1877 a small work in Spanish, ' jVEariposas 

 Chilenas,' with indifferent figures and descriptions of 

 several of the rarer ones, but gives little information as to 

 their habits and distribution. 



Wallengren in the ' Wiener Ent. Monatschrift,' and 

 'Eugenie's Resa,' and Fclder in the 'Reise der Xovara,' add 

 a few more to the list, but the first serious attempt at a 

 Catalogue of the Lepidoptera of Chile was that by Butler 

 in this Society's Transactions for 1881. 



This paper w^as based on a collection made in Chile by Mr. 

 Thomas Edmonds, and describes a good many new or sup- 

 posed new species, giving a full synonymy of those already 

 described, with some useful but rather fragmentary notes 

 by Mr. Edmonds on the localities in which they Avere 

 found. 



A translation of this paper into Spanish, with a list of 

 the Microlepidoptera of Chile described by Ragonot and 

 Zeller, was published by Mr. Bartlett Calvert, a member 



TRANS. ENT. SOC. LOND. 1903. — PART III. (OCT.) 



