180 Mr. P. H. Gosse on the Insects of Jamaica. 



In its fondness for ditches, banks, and other situations of dense 

 rank herbage, in its swift but irregular and vacillating flight, often 

 interrupted by the temptation of a flower, and in its general 

 habits and aspect, it reminds the observer strongly of the com- 

 mon European Vanessa. 



29. Vanessa Lavinia (var. Genoveva?). Rather common in 

 the winter and spring at Sabito and other lowland localities. 



30. Eurema Tecmesia. This beautiful species, which in the 

 markings of its wings both above and below cannot fail to recal 

 the varied pattern of our own Cardui and Atalanta, I met with 

 but rarely, and only in mountain localities. About the end of 

 March I took two specimens playing around the summits of 

 some flowering bushes, three or four yards high, at the brow of 

 Bluefields Mountain. They often alighted to suck the blossoms, 

 but were shy of approach^^asily alarmed, swift but irregular and 

 fitful in flight, and therefore captured with difficulty. In the 

 middle of June I took another in the Bamboo Walk on Grand 

 Vale Mountain, a sombre spot environed by the tall forest on 

 one hand, and by the graceful overshadowing bamboos on the 

 other, much resorted to by that striking butterfly Gyncecia Dirce, 

 a species rarely met with in other localities. These are almost 

 the only instances in which I obtained the present species, except 

 once or twice on the Hampstead Road. 



31. Cybdelis Hyperiptet Near the end of June 1846, as I 

 was proceeding along the coast from Bluefields to Kingston in a 

 little trading smack, we were lying windbound in a bight of the 

 dreary, rocky and inhospitable shore, marked on the charts with 

 the sufficiently appropriate name of Starvegut Bay. Having 

 nothing to do on board, I took a walk on shore, climbing over 

 the immense masses of fragmentary rock, against which the surf 

 was beating and boiling with furious violence, and shooting up 

 ever and anon white jets of vapour-like spray through the sea- 

 worn holes. In the woods, which consisted largely of the cashaw 

 {Prosopis juliflora), intermingled with some species of Inga and 

 the great Cactus Peruvianus, — a vegetation totally diff*ereut from 

 that in the neighbourhood of Bluefields, — I observed a Vanessa- 

 like butterfly, of brilliant blue iridescence, and some white spots 

 near the tip of the fore-wings, which I doubt not belonged to 

 this species. I had never met with it before, and as 1 had no 

 net with me, I did not capture any now. It was however in 

 some abundance ; flitted along close to the ground, in the shadow 

 of the woods, allowing an approach within a distance which would 

 have rendered its capture with a ring-net an easy matter. Its 

 manners bore some resemblance to those of the Satyridce. 



32. Cystineura Mardania. This again is one of the most 

 abundant of insects in those parts of Jamaica with which I am 



