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BUTTERFLIES OBSERVED DURING A SHORT TOUR 

 IN SOUTHERN FRANCE IN MAY, 1907. 



By H. Rowland-Brown, M.A., F.E.S. 



It has not been my experience before to make a prolonged 

 entomological tour in the month of May on the Continent, and 

 this perhaps lent additional zest and pleasure to my last visit to 

 France. For some years past I have been endeavouring to 

 collect material relative to the distribution of the Macro-Lepi- 

 doptera throughout this country, but, though I have been fairly 

 successful, there are still many absolute blanks upon the map 

 which registers the departments for which no records exist, or 

 for which I have been able to get no permanently valuable 

 information. My chief uncoloured areas embrace the eastern 

 frontier departments from Ardennes to Haute- Saone, the country 

 lying westward of the Cevennes and south of Cantal, and a wide 

 field in Central France, stretching chiefly in a south-easterly 

 direction. But it is only necessary to traverse these last two 

 regions by day to understand the reason for the paucity of ento- 

 mological references. Great plains, with every square acre of 

 land cultivated and husbanded with such care as can only be 

 seen in a country of peasant proprietorship — a scarcity of wood- 

 land enclosures, and of trees in general — these conditions offer 

 little attraction to the entomologist who concerns himself chiefly 

 with such insects as are not merely " nuisibles." Yet, I dare say, 

 round Limoges, the reputed northern limit in the west of Chryso- 

 phanus var. gordius, and in the warm upper valleys of those 

 tributaries of the Dordogne, the Lot, and the Tarn, there are 

 innumerable hunting-grounds lying unexplored, as there are 

 picturesque towns and old-world villages hardly known to the 

 majority of Frenchmen themselves. 



The day I left Paris for Rocamadour— May 3rd— was un- 

 promising enough, and not until sunset did the skies clear, as I 

 fondly imagined, for the familiar unbroken blue of the " Midi." 

 But next morning, when I woke to as perfect a spring day as 

 ever inspired the poets of Guienne, I was not a little surprised to 

 find vegetation hardly more advanced than I had left it m 

 England ; the poplars in the deep warm valley of the Alzou 

 were still greener with the mistletoe, which especially affects 

 them, than with their own foliage ; the vine-tree over the door 

 of the delightfully primitive hotel had hardly broken bud, and I 

 was hailed as the first tourist. The sunny slopes of the ravine, 

 to the side of which clings this interesting village, were, however, 

 clothed with wild flowers, and here and there great bushes of the 

 giant-fennel, suggestive of Papilio machaon ; while the several 

 platforms in the rock which mark the pilgrim-road for the faithful 



