THREE WEEKS IN DAUPHINY. 309 
rarer H}. melampus. The late Mr. Tutt made interesting suggestions 
upon the specific identity of Z. pharte and EF. melampus, based to 
some extent upon the difficulty of separating the females. His 
remarks were published anterior to the systematic examination 
of the male appendages by later authorities, and though, as he 
says, the females of the two species are sometimes identically 
marked and even fly together, my experience here-—and more 
markedly elsewhere in the Central Alps, and especially in the 
Tyrol—is that pharte is almost always passé, if not actually over, 
before melampus puts in an appearance. 
But it seems probable that here, at all events, there is a 
tendency among what may be presumed the weaker species to 
associate with and mimic the strongest, viz. Hrebia pharte, which 
at La Grave also is far and away the commonest of the small 
Erebias. Dr. Chapman, as stated (Proc. Ent. Soc. 1913, 
cxvii.-cix.), suspects a mimetic association at Le Lauteret; or in 
the alternative that climatic conditions may be responsible for 
this curious approximation of the three species to pharte. I did 
not take pharte last year at Larche; but there, too, ceto was of 
this diminutive Dauphiny form, and it flew apparently, for I 
was too late for the main emergence, over the ground where 
earlier I should have expected to meet with pharte, and did 
find epiphron and melampus. I see that Dr. Chapman hesitates 
to include epiphron in this association for want of material upon 
which to base his conclusions. But though rarer decidedly than 
the others, I find on looking through my captures that I also 
took the familiar ‘‘ Mountain Ringlet”’ without realising its specific 
identity. Lastly, I may supplement these observations to add 
that the long series of pharte from La Grave and Le Lauteret 
differ inter se. The females are quite as brilliant in the depth 
of the orange fascia as examples from Brenner and the ‘re 
Croce, Cortina. The rusty markings on the upper side of the 
male fore wings vary from a single small spot, towards the 
apical angle, to well-defined series of blotches, constituting a 
more or less continuous band. Of the epiphron, some are much 
nearer type than var. cassiope. The furious wind which never 
ceased to blow even when it was fine at Le Lauteret made 
expeditions hopeless to the higher mountains in search of 
butterflies. A friend who struggled up the Grand Galibier 
informed me that near the summit on the rocks he had seen 
some ‘‘all-black” butterflies battling with the tempest—and 
these no doubt would be Hrebia alecto, this being the actual spot 
whence Boisduval, more than half a century ago, received his 
first (?) French examples. 
Among the small fry on the Galibier route P. eros was the 
commonest of the ‘‘ Blues,” with P. pheretes males much injured 
by the buffeting of the past few days. Again | saw no 
P. icarus, but P. thersites afforded males, and a few lovely blue 
