85 



shoots of Silene inaritinia. This species may be distinguished from 

 its near allies by its black and white markings and want of any 

 ferruginous tint. 



Mr. Hy. J. Turner exhibited a long series of Erebia in-onne from 

 the Austrian Tyrol and from Switzerland ; and contributed the 

 following note : — 



" Although I have had a series of this species for some years, and 

 have collected in various parts of the Alps, it was not until the 

 summer of last year that I met with Erebia pronoe alive in its 

 native haunts. In early August, 1913, 1 spent some days in the 

 Dolomites and there met with the species in number, and a few 

 days later it was found in considerable abundance at Tre Croci in 

 the neighbourhood of Cortina. 



Esper was the first to describe this species in his " Schmetterlinge 

 in Abbildungen nach der Natur," in the year 1780, and to figure it 

 under the name Papilio Nympkales (/eiiiiiiati pronoe, on Plate 54. 



Erebia pronoe is a well distributed species, occurring over the 

 whole of the Alps — French, Swiss, and Austrian — the Pyrenees, 

 the Apennines, the Carpathians, S.-W. Russia, and the southern 

 slopes of the Caucasus, frequenting moist meadow land and grassy 

 slopes of the mountain and alpine regions up to some 3,000ft., 

 flying in a somewhat undecided and irregular manner not far from 

 the scattered trees at the borders of the more wooded areas. 



As will be seen from the series exhibited, there is a considerable 

 amount of variation, ranging from the banded specimens with eye- 

 spots to specimens devoid of either band or eye-spots, although 

 there seems a convergence of forms around these two extremes. In 

 fact, these two forms are more or less a matter of locality. The 

 banded form, that described by Esper under the name pronue, is the 

 dominant form over the Austrian Alps, the French Alps, and the 

 Pyrenees; while the form, characterized by uniformity of coloration, 

 and named pitho by Hubner, is dominant in the Swiss Alps. This 

 is not exclusively so, but pitho may be termed racial in the Swiss 

 Alps, whilst elsewhere it occurs only as an aberration or vice-vema. 

 In the Bavarian Alps, a form with rust-red bands on the forewings 

 and white pupilled eye-spots has been named subalpina by Gump- 

 penberg in the " Stettiner Ent. Zeit." Staudinger has named a 

 small form which he obtained in the Pyrenees as pi/renaica, and a 

 form in which all the eye-spots are without white pupils he calls 

 ahnanfiovia. 



The direction of variation may be summed up as follows : — 



