SPHINGID^ OF PERU. 75 



II.— IXTEODUCTION. 



In the early part of 1907 I paid my first visit to South America, and on May 1st 

 found myself in the port of Callao, seven miles from the Peruvian capital, with 

 VFhich it is connected by road, rail, and a fast electric tram service. Here I lived for 

 three years, having agreed to serve as chaplain to the Anglo-American community 

 in Lima. 



Though the so-called rainless coast did not seem to offer much prospect to an 

 entomologist, I was pleasantly surprised to find Lima by no means the poor centre of 

 operations that I had anticipated. Limited as it is in the nature and extent of its 

 vegetation, I am inclined to believe that few, if any, other positions on the Peruvian 

 seaboard possess a more varied and interesting fauna than the level tract which is 

 more or less artificially irrigated by the river Rimac. 



This and the river Chillon, ten miles to the north, together with their network of 

 ditches and acequias, are practically responsible for the entire vegetation of a very 

 considerable stretch of land between the Andes and the sea. The hills immediately 

 behind are grey and barren for the most part, but the city and its suburbs of Miraflores, 

 Barranco, and Chorrillos rise in the midst of fruit Imertas. Vineyards, oliveyards, 

 fields of emerald-green alfalfa, yuca, camote, potato, maize, sugar-cane, and cotton 

 cover the plain to the base of the hills and to the limit of vision on every hand. The 

 fields are variously defined by adohe walls or by water acequias banked with tall reeds, 

 ferns, tangled creepers, and wild nasturtium, broken at intervals by a row of slender 

 willows and several wild solanaceous shrubs. Avenues of dark evergreen ficus-trees 

 mark the confines of habitation, and the buildings are relieved by palm-trees, plazas, 

 and flower-gardens. Beyond the fertilized region, however, which is strictly limited, 

 all is arid and death-like, for there succeed great wastes of desert sand and choking 

 dust, unrelieved often for miles by a single blade of green to break the monotony of 

 grey and ochre. Such, at any rate, may be regarded as a brief general description of 

 that part of the Peruvian seaboard in which I lived, and where I enjoyed the fullest 

 opportunity for entomological research. 



But Lima was a good centre also, in that it off'ered unique facilities for an extended 

 survey of two other collecting-grounds which present the most marked contrasts of 

 form and feature, and are as diverse from one another as each is from the coast region. 

 I refer, in the first place, to that marvel of engineering skill, the Oroya Railroad, which 

 works its way up the Rimac Valley to the river's source at an altitude of no less than 

 15,660 feet, and commands not only scenery of the utmost grandeur and variety, but 

 gives access to an ever-changing strata of plant and insect life as the diff"erent elevations 

 of the Andes are reached. Though a number of small moths and some ten or a dozen 

 butterflies are associated with the reduced vegetation of the great upland pampa of 

 Junin and the grass-clothed hills of limestone around at a general elevation of from 



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