CYANIRIS SEMIARGUS. 259 



the greatest caution. The colour of the upperside of the wings in the 

 females is of two distinct shades of fuscous (1) brownish-fuscous, 

 (2) blackish-fuscous. The blackest-coloured $ s in the British Museum 

 coll. come from Courmayeur, Luchon, Fusio, Rilo Dagh, Bosnia, and 

 the Altai. A very pale fuscous $ from Granada shows a tendency to the 

 development of a pale marginal band of lunules on the upperside of all 

 the wings, a most unusual line of development, the extreme bases of 

 the wings also are slightly tinged with blue. The darkest ? s in our 

 collection come from Canales, Moncayo, Larche, the Brevent, Aigle, 

 the Simplon, Pontresina, and Guarda, but somehow one has doubt? 

 whether the ? s are not all blackish-fuscous when quite freshly 

 emerged. Gillmer describes (Bit. Ent. Zeits. Guben, ii., pp. 312-313) 

 a large $ under the name of ab. Jiavescens, which he says has 

 " the ground colour of the upperside of a yellow tint, without 

 reaching the yellow colour of Plebeius aryyroynomon ab. lutea, Car. ; 

 a similar $ is noted by Wadzek (Ins. Borse, xxiii., p. 68). 

 Muschamp notes (in litt.) a ? of a pale slaty-grey colour taken near 

 Geneva. Such European $ s as have come under our notice are very rarely 

 tinged with blue even at the base (=byze, Bergstrasser). There are 

 some specimens in the British Museum coll. without data, assumed, 

 without any real knowledge, however, to come from "Germany," 

 with the bases of the wings, sometimes to the disc or even beyond, 

 quite conspicuously scaled with blue, but Gillmer states that the 

 German 2 s are usually unicolorous brownish-black, sometimes, how- 

 ever, scaled with blue near the base; Grund observes that, in the 

 Agram district, the $ s are seldom dusted with blue on the upperside, 

 and even then, only weakly at the base ; there is, also, in the British 

 Museum coll., a $ from " Meiringen" fairly well- scaled with blue, and 

 the pale example from Granada, already noted, has the bases slightly 

 blue. The ? s from Central and Eastern Asia appear to be entirely 

 dark fuscous-brown. The Oriental races are very remarkable in the 

 fact that the European $ examples of the special races of the Balkan 

 Peninsula, allied as they are to those of Asia Minor, Syria and Persia, 

 are practically without blue scales, whilst those of the countries last 

 named show a strong tendency to blue scaling, those from the Lebanon, 

 var. antiochena, being really most brightly tinted and very beautiful. 

 These are noted at length in our descriptions of the various races. 

 The development of orange or fulvous marginal spots on the 

 upperside of the fore- and hindwings is also confined, so far as the 

 large number of specimens examined shows, to the Balkan Penin- 

 sula, Syria and Persia; it is beautifully developed in var. 

 helena, Staud., in the Morea, and antiochena, Led., in Syria. 

 The underside of the $ s is generally uniform pearly-grey, differing, 

 however, greatly in the depth of the tint, sometimes very weakly brown, 

 when it is difficult to distinguish from the darker grey-brown or brown 

 of the ? s. The bases of the wings on the underside are usually 

 more or less scaled with blue, especially at the base of the hindwings, 

 and generally more strongly in the S s than in the ? s. The. best- 

 developed example in the British Museum coll., in this direction, is a $ 

 from Britain, in which the blue reaches to the discal lunule on the 

 hindwing and almost as far in the forewing, and reminds one somewhat 

 of the underside of Cyaniris coelestina, Evers., and C. alticula, Christph. ; 

 other well-marked examples are from Norway, Ticino, Bosnia, Bulgaria, 



