African Species of the Genus Acraea. 145 



Acraea acrita appears to be a very unstable species of 

 wide distribution, and on the verge of becoming divided 

 into several different species. Its extreme variability 

 combined Avith an excessive development of seasonal 

 dimorphism has led to the description of a confusing 

 multiplicity of forms. The highly complicated structure 

 of the male armature, extending as it does to remarkable 

 modifications in the structure of the dorsal abdominal 

 plate, serves rather to enhance than to mitigate the 

 difficulty. For a time I was of opinion that the forms 

 could be resolved into several distinct species, but having 

 now examined some hundreds of examples, including 

 specimens from practically every known locality and taken 

 at different seasons, and having also examined the 

 structure of the male and female armatures in examples 

 occurring throughout the range of the species, I can find 

 no satisfactory means of dividing the forms into anything 

 more deiiuite than subspecies. Several geographical 

 races or subspecies appear to be recognisable. At the 

 northern limit of its range the subspecies j9WfZo9'Wi6i occurs, 

 characterised by its more than usually elongated wings, 

 and the paucity or absence, according to the season, of 

 spots in the f-w. Further south, along the East Coast 

 and extending as far as Dela'jjoa Bay, is the subspecies 

 which I have called littorcdis. I should have been 

 glad to have avoided the addition of another name to the 

 already over-extended list, were it not for the fact that 

 most of the existing names of forms which appear to 

 belong to this subspecies indicate definite localities, and 

 thus are apt to be misleading. Following this arc the 

 typical acrita and acrita ambigua which may be regarded 

 as the central races, whilst in Angola the subspecies 

 hellona appears to be perhaps the most distinctly 

 separated of all, and is characterised by the exceptionally 

 large size of the black spots in the f.-w. 



These races include all the described forms except f. 

 2xtu,perata, Thurau, and the subspecies manca. 



Pauperata may occur in any subspecies, being merely 

 distinguished by the absence of the basal spot in area lb 

 of the f-w. It is unfortunate that this feature should 

 have been utilised as a key character by Strand in his 

 list of the forms (l. c. sup.), since it is one of the most 

 variable and unstable features of the species. It is not 

 consistently absent even in puclorina, whilst several 



TRANS. ENT. SOC. LOND. 1912. — PART I. (jITLY) L 



