170 BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY. 



known. Groups like the Satyrinas that are fond of shady places and 

 live on hill sides and rocky dells are nearly always of a dull-brown 

 colour ; the Euplceinee that inhabit dark moist dells and live in the 

 thick undergrowth of forests are all black ; the Pieringe that fly 

 about in the sun in almost any kind of climate are generally white or 

 yellow ; and the desert group of this family, the Teracoli, that mostly 

 frequent barren sandy tracts in the hottest parts of the world, have 

 their white colours tinted and patched with most brilliant sun-spots 

 of bright yellow and salmon colour ; they only fly about in the hottest 

 part of the day, and are very difficult to distinguish. Then there are 

 the leaf butterflies, or Kallimas, and their allies, which, when on the 

 wing, frequent the tops of high trees; their flight is very swift, and 

 most of them are of larg*e size. On the upper surface their wings 

 are often brilliantly coloured, but underneath have the colouration and 

 markings of various kinds of leaves, and when they settle, you see 

 them vanish into a tree and become at once invisible. The com- 

 mon Indian form, Kallima inaclds, for instance, a N.- W. Himalayan 

 insect, generally settles amongst the dried leaves of a tree, and 

 perching head downwards with closed wings so exactly resemble a 

 dried leaf as to be invisible. Many of the Pierinas have also mimic 

 eaves on their under surface. The largest of them are the 

 Hebomoias. I have only two species of this genus, H. glaucijope, 

 from various parts of India — very plentiful in Bombay, on Malabar 

 Hill — and the Nicobar species, Rceepstorffii, and they both represent 

 excellent imitations of leaves on their under surface. The subject, 

 however, of the mimicry of one form of butterfly or another form 

 was first brought clearly before the scientific world by Mr. Bates 

 in an excellent paper which appeared in the Transactions of the 

 Linnaean Society for 1862, Vol. 33, p. 495, and subsequently Mr. 

 Wallace brought many remarkable facts on this subject to light. 

 It was observed by Mr. Bates that imitating species are com- 

 paratively rare, whilst the imitated are to be found in great numbers, 

 the two sets living together. The imitated were for the most part 

 brilliantly coloured insects, and he therefore concluded that they must 

 be protected from the attacks of birds, &c, by some secretion or 

 noxious odour, and this has now been abundantly proved, and his 

 paper on this subject in P. E. S. 1866, 3rd December, p. 45, is well 

 worth reading. I do not propose to give just now a paper of scien- 

 tific deductions. The principle of mimicry has been written about 

 and argued out by many scientific men since Mr. Bates first brought 



