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REVIEWS. 

 LEPIDOPTERA INDIOA. 



Entomologists in India will be glad to hear that Leindoptera Indica has 

 now been completed. The work was commenced in 1890 by Dr. F. Moore 

 and dedicated by him to Queen Victoria. In 1907 Moore died before he 

 had completed the work, a fatality that befell the authors of the only other 

 books on Indian butterflies, thereby seriously interfering with our pros- 

 pects of obtaining a complete account of the butterflies of India. However, 

 an able successor to Dr. Moore was found in Col. C. Swinhoe and he is to 

 be heartily congratulated on having completed the work. 



The book has been published in 123 parts, to be arranged in ten volumes; 

 there are 835 coloured plates. Two hundred and fifty copies have been 

 printed and the price complete is £85. The publishers, Messrs. L. Reeve 

 & Co., announce that they are prepared to supply the work on the deferred 

 payment system and to furnish sets with uncoloured plates or of the 

 letterpress only. 



The book contains a full list of references, and a detailed description of 

 every family, genus and species : also, v\'hen known, an account of the 

 earlier stages and of the habits generally. There is a coloured figure of 

 the male, female and underside of every species, and in many cases of the 

 larva and pupa, and of the various seasonal forms. In the latter parts 

 drawings of the genitalia, head, etc., have been given. The book can, in 

 fact, be said to be as complete as it was possible for the authors to 

 make it. 



The first attempt to produce a connected account of Indian butterflies 

 was made by De Niceville, though Moore had some years previously 

 written a magnificent work in three volumes on the butterflies of Ceylon. 

 In his Lepido])tera Indica, Moore followed generally the arrangement adopt- 

 ed by De Niceville, but he divided up many of the more important genera 

 into numbers of new genera based on slight difl^erences in the venation 

 or in the secondary sexual characters. In addition to this, he divided up 

 the six families into 48 sub-families, one of which, the Nymj)halin8e, was 

 further subdivided into 8 groups. This system is, perhaps, scientifically 

 correct ; it is certainly not popular with the collector and it remains to be 

 seen whether it will survive. As to species, Moore and Col. Swinhoe 

 belonged to what may perhaps be called the old school of entomologists 

 who separated any apparently constantly difl'ering form as a species, and 

 many of us will, no doubt, remember the somewhat heated controversies 

 that raged between Watson and De Niceville on the one hand and Moore, 

 Butler and Col. Swinhoe on the other. The modern school, of which the 

 Tring Museum and the German entomologists are the exponents, have 

 struck a happy mean in the ''race" system, thus reviving in another form 

 many of Moore's species, that Watson and De Niceville and later Bingham 

 would have nothing to do with. That Moore was an extremely careful and 

 conscientious observer is undoubted, there is none of the carelessness in 

 his work that one comes across so often in Bingham's volume on butterflies 

 in the Fauna of India series. It is only just to Col. Swinhoe to state that 

 he has fully maintained the standard set by Moore, though, perhaps, not 

 always so accurate. He is, however, a member of the same school and his 

 treatment of some of our well known species was somewhat alarming ; for 

 instance the liecabe group of the genus Terias, where 26 " species" are 

 given for what have generally been considered to represent at most 3 or 4 

 really distinct species. In the descriptions of the genera and species 

 a detailed account is given of each feature, a system that is excellent as 



