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THE BUTTERFLIES OF THE NORTH CANARA DISTRICT 

 OF THE BOMBAY PRESIDENCY. 



By J. Davidson, T. R. Bell, and E. H. Aitken. 



Pakt I. 



(With Plates I, II, III.) 



{Read before the Bombay Natural History Society on 

 l^th January^ 1896.) 



In the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, vol. V 

 (1890), pp. 260j 3493 two of us published a paper on some ot the larvae 

 and pupse of the butterflies of the Bombay Presidency, in which we 

 described 94 species which we had ourselves reared. In the next two 

 yearSj Mr. Bell having in the meantime joined us in our investigations, 

 we had added so largely to this number that we began to meditate 

 a supplementary paper. For various reasons, however, this did not 

 get itself done, as Carlyle would have said, and now the number of 

 butterflies, of which the transformations remain to be discovered, has 

 become so small that it seems invidious to leave them out, and we have 

 decided that our paper should take the form of a list of the butterflies 

 which we have met with in the district, with such information as we 

 can give regarding their habits and transformations. We will not 

 repeat descriptions published in our former paper, but we will sup- 

 plement or correct these where it appears to be necessary, and in some 

 instances give figures of larvae which were only described before. 



As regards the time of the year at which each species is on the wing, 

 our notes are not so satisfactory as we could have wished. One reason, 

 for this is that we are all district officers, spending the monsoon at 

 Karwar and the dry-season on tour through the district, many parts 

 of which are quite different from Karwar in the character of their 

 vegetation and other conditions which influence the butterfly popula- 

 tion. So it happens that our observations of particular species are 

 interrupted for months at a time. Collectors in other parts of India 

 often write of the number of broods in the year in terms which imply 

 more regularity than we have observed in this moist and equable 

 climate. We are not inclined to think that the majority of species here 

 have any fixed number of broods in the year. One generation succeeds 



