Cae”) 
Tf I adopted them and based a study of the distribution of 
Indian Satyrinw on them, I should probably arrive at grossly 
distorted and unreliable results. 
This being the case in regions which have been well worked, 
and of which the butterflies are fairly known, how much 
more difficult it is to decide as to regions which, like many 
parts of Africa, are almost unknown. I cannot dismiss this 
part of the subject without referring to some remarks by 
Canon Tristram, F'.R.§., in the Ibis for January, 1895, p. 180. 
He says, 
‘‘The question is:—is the multiplication of genera, each 
‘¢ containing one or two species and those closely allied, an aid 
‘‘or a hindrance to the study of the subject? To quote the 
‘words of Dr. Bowdler Sharpe on another point in nomen- 
‘‘clature, and which I would apply to many of the new- 
‘‘fangled genera, ‘An arrangement we shall never adopt, 
‘«¢ag we consider it a clumsy and unnecessary method of 
“ «nomenclature, and one that in the hands of unscrupulous 
‘‘¢ writers may be employed ad lib. to gain a little tem- 
‘« «porary notoriety and end in making the study of birds 
‘« ‘impossible. Can any science bear the weight of such 
‘« ¢a system of nomenclature?’ ”’ 
I say decidedly, No. 
The Rhopalocera are perhaps the best adapted for analysis, 
as being better known and less numerous than Coleoptera or 
Heterocera, but as soon as you begin to compare lists of butter- 
flies from different regions and sub-regions with the object of 
‘finding out the proportion of peculiar genera and _ species 
characteristic of them, you are at once involved in a host of 
minor difficulties arising from the two causes above men- 
tioned. And though one is able to give the general features of 
the butterfly fauna of many of the sub-regions, one cannot 
be sure how far their relative degree of specialization may 
not have to be modified by future discoveries and _ better 
systems of classification based on larger materials for study. 
Shortly after the publication of Dr. Sclater’s classical 
paper on the Distribution of Birds, Mr. W. F. Kirby pub- 
lished, in the Journal of the Linnean Society, Zool., 
Vol. XL, p. 481, 1878, a short paper on the Distribution 
