COMMON BUTTERFLIES OF THE PLAINS OF INDIA. 543 



once. The insect is fond of the evergreen jungles as ah^eady 

 remarked and there it delights to fly in the intervals of hot sun- 

 shine along roads, paths and the borders of clearings ; it rises high 

 amongst the tree-tops but often descends to within a few feet of 

 the ground on the edges of openings and summits of hills where 

 the jungle is more or less scrubby, flying with a rather weak wing- 

 stroke but in the ordinary Pajnlio manner, stopping at an occasional 

 flower to feed, circling round the foliage of shrubs surrounding its 

 food-plant or diving down into dark nallas over rippling streams to 

 emerge again into sunshine on the other side. This is true of the 

 male, but the female, curiously enough, is rarelj^ seen. Curiously 

 enough, because, in breeding from the caterpillar, rather more 

 females are obtained than males. Probably the female attends 

 more diligently to business while the other sex sports about in 

 the intervals of courtship, like most inferior masculine creatures. 

 During some ten years of collecting, only two females were caught 

 as compared with dozens and dozens of males ; and one of these 

 had only just emerged from the chrysalis for its wings were hardly 

 re ady for flight ; the other was captured sitting on a leaf by the 

 roadside in the characteristic position with the forewing hiding the 

 brilliant peacock-blue spot of the hinder one. In those days a 

 female tamilana was a red-letter event, for the larva had not been yet 

 discovered. And that was not for want of searching either. The 

 history of the search and final discovery after twelve years would 

 aflbrd an excellent example of the difficulties sometimes experien- 

 ced in learning the life-histories of insects. The food-plant of the 

 larva is JEvodia roxburcjhiana, Benth., a moderate sized tree grow- 

 ing in the evergreen forest regions of the Western Ghats south 

 of Bombay. It belongs to the Rutacece. and the leaf has the 

 characteristic smell belonging to that family of plants ; the flowei'S 

 are small, arranged in many branched bunches from the axils of 

 the leaves, plenty of them when the tree is in flower at the end of 

 the monsoon ; the leaf is rather large, soft, divided into three leaf- 

 lets, the whole with a long stalk. Uvodia as a genus is found 

 throughout India in the hills and extends through Burma to the 



Malayan Region and Australia. 

 31 



