ARICIA MEDON. 293 



garden, on limestone, outside the town, and on the wooded railway 

 banks at Dumar, which were covered with flowering crucifers. In the 

 Lebanon he observes that pine woods are its favourite haunts, while in 

 the more barren Anti-Lebanon, with its drier and hotter climate, 

 grassy and bushy places are preferred. At Aleih, in the Lebanon, he 

 found it on a slope above the station covered with trees and brush- 

 wood, and at Bludan, in the Anti-Lebanon, on hillsides and gardens in 

 the village. 



Distribution. — This species seems fairly distributed over England, 

 the greater part of Wales, and most of Scotland except the extreme 

 north, as we have records for all the English counties and most of the 

 Welsh and Scotch ; we strongly suspect moreover that it will eventually 

 be recorded from the rest, or, at any rate, from nearly, all of them. 

 Widely distributed in this island as it is, it must be regarded as one 

 of our more local species ; there are many apparently suitable places 

 where it is not found, and many where its favoured localties are of very 

 limited extent. In the south it is usually common, both on the coast and 

 on the inland downs, as far west as Devonshire, but becomes scarcer in 

 Cornwall, though extending to the Lands End; it occurs commonly 

 in the Chilterns and is by no means scarce in the Cotswolds ; though 

 very local in the north it occurs in some places in abundance as a 

 coast species, especially in Durham and Northumberlrnd, Fife, Forfar 

 and Kincardineshire; it is scarcely less frequent on the coasts of 

 Aberdeen and has been taken as far north as Nigg Sutor, on the Frith 

 of Cromarty, and at Tarbat Ness in the north of the county of Ross, 

 and is widely distributed in Perthshire. There are as yet no records 

 from Sutherland or Caithness, but it is by no means unlikely that it 

 occurs on the east coast of these counties at any rate. The western 

 coast is not so much favoured by it as the eastern, and it is not, like 

 Polyommatus icarus, an island species though it is has been taken on 

 the Isle of Islay. It is of frequent occurence also in the Isle of Wight, 

 but the other islands from which it is recorded, Anglesey, Purbeck, 

 Thanet, Sheppey, Canvey, Osey, etc., can either barely make good their 

 claim to the name, or are at most cut off from the mainland by the 

 narrowest channels. Though scarce, and even more local in the west, 

 it occurs on the sea-board of Ayr, Wigtown, Kircudbright and Dumfries, 

 is fairly common in the coast-region of Furness, both in Lancashire 

 and Westmorland, occurs in all the Welsh counties whose shores face 

 the north or the south, and is reported by South as abundant in the 

 extreme south west corner of Wales. In the midlands, except, as 

 mentioned above, in the Chilterns and Cotswolds, it is generally scarce 

 and local, though in a few instances plentiful where it occurs. In 

 Ireland the only modern record seems to be from Clonbrook in Galway 

 where it appears to occur every year in the artaxerxes form, though 

 Birchall formerly recorded it from Dundrum near Dublin, and from 

 the Mourne and Wicklow mountains, and there is a specimen, also of 

 the artaxerxes form, in the Brit. Mus. coll., from the Frey coll., 

 labelled " Dublin," but without any further data. A remarkable 

 instance of this species appearing suddenly over a considerable area in 

 Essex was reported by Harwood, who wrote as follows : — " This has 

 recently become one of our commonest butterflies; previous to 1896 it 

 was quite a rarity in the neighbourhood of Colchester, but in that year 



