EREBIA EPIPHRON, KNOCH. 



245 



the British Lepidoptera,' enumerates on p. 340 " Erehia epi- 

 phron {Cassiope, ¥.)," thus. It is all the more surprising, therefore, 

 to find Fritz Riihl in the same year reverting to the discarded 

 classification of the German writers in his work, "Die palaeark- 

 tischen Gross-schmetterlinge " (Bd. i, Tagfalter, pp. 474-475). 

 But he gives his reasons for so doing, inconclusive though they 

 may appear, as being based almost entirely on superficial char- 

 acters, which, as we have seen over and over again, vary indefi- 

 nitely in the intermediate forms between the type and Cassiope, 

 and this is his arrangement of the type and its varieties : 



Epiphron, Knoch. 



Var. Pyrenaica, H.-S., Melia, Kaden. 

 Cassiope, F. 



Var. Nelavms, Boisd. 



Var. Valesiaca, Meyer-Diir. 



and to justify these conclusions he adds : " Schmetterlingebenso 

 gross wie Epiphron, zu welcher Art Cassiope haiifig als Varietat 

 gestellt wird, jedoch habe ich nach Verleichung des mir vollie- 

 genden umfassenden Materials die Ueberzeugnung gewonnen,dass 

 Cassiope als eigene Art zu betrachten." 



In the following year, 1896, J. W. Tutt, under the title of 

 Melampias epiphron, Knoch, accepts and incorporates (' British 

 Butterflies,' pp. 425-430) the classification, and the several 

 varieties adopted by Mr. Meyrick and Edward Newman, and 

 finally by Dr. Fras. J. Buckell in his paper on ^'Erehia epiphron 

 .and its Named Varieties — A Study in Synonomy," published 

 July 15th, 1894, in the ' Entomologist's Piecord,' v, pp. 161-165, 

 adding on his own account : 



N. ab. obsoleta, " with the fulvous bands entirely absent, the upper 

 surface unicolorous blackish-brown." 



Simultaneously the late Mr. W. F. Kirby, in 'A Hand-Book 

 of the Order Lepidoptera,' pt. 1, i, p. 23), as if there were still a 

 doubt as to the specific identity, makes the curious remark 

 under Erehia epiphron, var. E. cassiope {sic), '' In the allied form 

 E. epiphron, Knoch, which many writers consider to be the same 

 species, but is very doubtfully British, the eyes are ocellated." 



The figure of Epiphron (plate viii, fig. 1) in Prof. Ernst 

 Hofmann's ' Die Gross-schmetterlinge Europas,' 1894, is a daub. 

 It is intended apparently to represent a female of the type, and 

 displays an insect with large white ocellations to the spots in a 

 continuous series of rusty bands on the fore and hind wings 

 alike. The text is as uninstructive. But both description and 

 figures are much improved in Dr. Arnold Spuler's third edition 

 of the same work, published at Stuttgart in 1903, where the 

 classification is varied as follows : 



" ab. nekwins, constituting the transition to the ab. mnemon. 

 ab. pyrenaica.'' 



