66 BRTTISH BUTTERFLIES. 



enquiring way when the larva comes to a difficult position, or it 

 stretches itself bodily over a space that has to be bridged. The larvae 

 appear to grow very rapidly in the last stage, in bulk they certainty 

 increase more than twice their size at the commencement of this 

 instar. Wood observes (in litt.) that, although in the earlier stages 

 the larvae may be found feeding freely during the night, yet, in the 

 final instar, they appear to feed for about three hours previous to dark- 

 ness, and then disappear. Zeller was the first lepidopterist to discover 

 the larval habits of this species, the caterpillars of which, he states 

 (Stett. Ent. Ztg., 1852, p. 425), he found exclusively on Coronilla 

 varia. He says the larvae usually hide concealed during the day, but 

 that rarely, on bright days, he found them on the foodplant attended 

 by ants. Most of the larvae, however, were found after sunset among 

 the roots of the foodplant ; they were especially abundant one year, 

 when the larvae of Antkrocera peucedani were so common that they had 

 eaten down the plants on the hillside quite bare, and the discovery of 

 the larvae of A. coridon was, in consequence, quite easy; after a rainy 

 day, some of the latter were smeared with clay, showing the larvae 

 were either on, or actually in, the ground, before climbing on their food- 

 plant. He adds that they eat the flower- buds, then the leaves, and even the 

 ends of the stalks, whilst their mode of progression is an even, snail-like 

 gliding, in which the oval shining black head, with its grey horizontal 

 stripe above the mouth, comes somewhat prominently forward. One 

 is most likely to find them fullfed in the second half of June, but 

 since the butterfly has a long period of flight, they may be found even 

 into July. Schmid found the larvae from April to June in various 

 sizes, mostly hidden by day under flat stones in the vicinity of Hippo- 

 crepis comosa ; Speyer records that he once found a larva beneath the 

 leaves of the foodplant, Astragalus glycyphyllus, which produced a 

 butterfly on August 10th ; Bartel and Herz make the remarkable 

 statement that "the larvae live from autumn to June on Coronilla 

 varia and Onobrychis, and that, during the day, they hide in the sand; " 

 one wonders whence this information was obtained. Koch observes 

 that the larvae feed on Coronilla varia and C. minima, are fullgrown at 

 the end of June, and, among tall heath, hide by day below the surface 

 of the ground. Kranz states that the larvae hide by day on the ground, 

 proceeding only to the foodplant at night. Krodel states (Alhj. Zeits. fiir 

 Ent., ix., pp. 104-106) that he collected several hundreds of larvae in the 

 Main valley, and noticed it as peculiar that, although the latter district 

 possesses a comparatively warm climate, larvae sent him from Regens- 

 burg were almost double the size of the Main valley ones. He found 

 the larvae by day, and says that the eaten down ends of the plants of 

 //. comosa were unfailing guides, and that, if they were not underneath 

 the stones lying nearest to these, he had only to pull down the heaps 

 of stones collected together from -5 metre to 1 metre high, to find 

 them on the lowest layer of stones close over the damp cool ground, 

 sitting harmoniously together, some near, others on top of, one another. 

 He observes that the larva> of A. coridon, unlike those of Hirsutina dam on, 

 feed only at night, and, at daybreak, seek as much protection as possible 

 from the sunlight, creeping into any cranny that offered protection, 

 and squeezing themselves through the narrowest clefts ; this was fully 

 illustrated by the escape of almost half the larva 1 collected, from a 

 breeding-cage which had an almost imperceptible chink in it, a fact 



