Czy) 
precious opportunities of observing in nature several cases of 
mimicry between species not inhabiting the Cape Colony. 
There was no claim to originality in my paper; it simply 
rounded off the case by adding from Africa, the third great 
tropical region of the globe, a series of instances and observed 
facts confirmatory of those brought forward by Bates from 
the Neotropical, and by Wallace from the Orientalregion. Of 
course I had had nothing like the extended field experiences of 
those great naturalists, and the African material then avail- 
able was but scanty; but it so happened that perhaps the 
most striking and elaborate of all recorded cases of mimicry — 
that exhibited by the females of the Mverope-group of Papilio— 
had come under my personal observation in South Africa, 
and [I was thus in a position to describe satisfactorily a 
wonderful illustration of the Batesian theory.* 
It will be remembered that Bates, in his memorable paper 
(l. c., p. 507), also brought to notice the very close resem- 
blances, or apparent mimicries, which unquestionably 
exist between species belonging to different groups or sub- 
families of protected distasteful butterflies themselves; but 
neither he nor Wallace felt able to give any explanation of 
these instances, which obviously differed very materially from 
the cases of mimicry of an unpalatable protected species by a 
palatable unprotected one. Not until 1879 was there any 
elucidation of this side of the matter, but in May of that year 
appeared in ‘“ Kosmos,’’ Fritz Miller’s notable paper on 
““Jtuna and Thyridia,”’ which was translated by Professor 
Meldola, and printed in our ‘ Proceedings’’ for the same 
year (p. xx.). In this memoir, Miller made the valuable 
suggestion that the advantage derivable from these resem- 
blances between protected forms was the division between 
two species of the percentage of victims to the inexperience 
of young insectivorous enemies which every separate species, 
however well protected by distastefulness, must pay. 
* At various subsequent dates I was enabled, through the valuable aid of 
Mr. J. P. Mansel Weale and Colonel J. H. Bowker, to make known to 
science conclusive evidence of the species-identity of the three mimetic 
females of Papilio cenea, and of the pairing of the widely-differing sexes of 
that species. —See Trans. Ent. Soc. Lond., 1874, p. 187, and 1881, p. 169; 
and “ South Afr. Butterflies,’ iii., p. 254 (1889). 
