CYANIRIS SEMIARGUS. 257 



out by Staudinger as parnassia trndbellis, showing that he had distributed 

 this race widely under wrong names. The specimens with the 

 widest borders, in our collection, come from the Val Yeni and Mont 

 de la Saxe, in Piedmont; the Brevent, in Savoy; Evolene, the Bricolla 

 Alp, Andermatt, Fusio, and the Simplon (widest of all) in Switzerland, 

 Lolling and the Kor Alpe, in Cannthia, whilst, in the British Museum 

 coll., the widest-margined examples come also from Courmayeur, the 

 Ticino valley, Bergiin, and the Pyrenees, at 5000ft. or 6000ft., and, as 

 already noticed, the Bulgarian (Kilo) and Persian races have exceed- 

 ingly good borders. It will be seen that practically all these wide- 

 margined examples come from high, or moderately high, elevations, 

 and these are wide, in a sense that the wider-margined examples from 

 central Europe ( = semiargus, Bott.) rarely reach. Rowland-Brown 

 notes that the specimens from the central Alps show much wider and 

 deeper black margins than those taken lower down, and Blachier adds 

 that he finds the band wider and more suffused interiorly in the 

 specimens from the mountains than those captured in the lower 

 country. These wide-margined examples from the Alps, up to at 

 least 4000ft., are not wanting in size, indeed, some are of more than 

 average size, hence, although they show in colour, width of band, 

 suffusion, spotting, etc., the general characters of the mountain race, 

 they are not referable to rnontana, Meyer-Diir, as limited by that author, 

 and we call them in our collection var. rnontana- grandis, n. ab. Connected 

 with the marginal band of the hindwing is a most interesting aberra- 

 tional feature, viz., the development of little sagittate or cuneiform 

 prolongations between the nervures, so that the wing appears 

 ornamented with points growing out of the black border = ab. dentata, 

 n. ab. Reverdin observes that, in many of his $ s, the black margin, 

 instead of terminating in a more or less diffuse manner on its inner 

 border, presents, in the middle of the interneural spaces, a 

 rounded projection which gives the idea of black points, of which the 

 outer half is lost in the border and the inner half projects into the 

 blue ground colour of the wing; examined under a lens, these examples 

 recall the disposition of the black marginal points of certain Plcbeius argus 

 (aegon) ; among others, two $ s from Arolla (June 14th, 23rd, 1907), 

 and a J from Gondo (July 9th, 1907) are very characteristic in this 

 respect, and it may be here noted that these three $ s present, on the 

 underside, indications of brown marginal spots beneath in the same 

 position. Blachier says that he has an example from the Laquin- 

 thal with five of these interneural toothed points on each of the 

 hindwings. It may also be here noted that Bergstrasser's byzas 

 shows a similar marginal row of interneural spots on the hindwings. 

 There is considerable variation in size in the species, in both sexes, 

 occasionally as an aberration, more often racially. It is generally 

 stated that the alpine examples are smaller than those from the plains, 

 but such a sweeping assertion requires a great deal of modification. 

 In the British Museum coll., the largest European examples come from 

 Berlin, Hungary, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Ticino, Zurich, whilst the £ s from 

 Courmayeur (4000ft.), Bergiin (4550ft.), and the Tyrol are also 

 sometimes of large size ; also large in size are both sexes from 

 the Pyrenees, the Urals, Mongolia, the Altai, and Amurland ; 

 in our collection the largest examples come from Ticino — Fusio 

 (early July), Locarno (June), Carinthia — Lolling, Sau-Alpe 



