LIFE IN LONDON 403 



by experimental breeding that eggs laid by any one of these 

 females are capable of producing butterflies of all the different 

 forms which in the few cases recorded are quite distinct 

 from each other, without intermediate gradations. 



The local diversities of form are illustrated by outline 

 figures (as regards two species of papilio from Celebes) in 

 my "Malay Archipelago" (p. 216), and similar local pecu- 

 liarities of colour, both in papilio and other groups, are 

 described in my " Natural Selection and Tropical Nature " 

 (pp. 384, 385), while extraordinary development of size in 

 Amboyna is referred to at p. 307 of my " Malay Archi- 

 pelago." 



This brief outline of the paper will, perhaps, enable my 

 readers to understand the intense interest I felt in working 

 out all these strange phenomena, and showing how they 

 could almost all be explained by that law of " Natural Selec- 

 tion " which Darwin had discovered many years before, and 

 which I had also been so fortunate as to hit upon. 



The only other groups of insects upon which I did any 

 systematic work were the families of Pieridae among butter- 

 flies and Cetoniidse among beetles. Of the former family, 

 which contains our common whites, our brimstone and orange 

 tip butterflies, I gave a list of all known from the Indian and 

 Australian regions, describing fifty new species, mostly from 

 my own collection. This paper is in the " Transactions of 

 the Entomological Society for 1867," and is illustrated by four 

 coloured plates. The other paper, which is contained in the 

 same volume, is a catalogue of the Cetoniidae (or Rose- 

 chafers, named after our common species) of the Malay 

 Archipelago, in which I described seventy new species, the 

 majority of which were collected by myself, and it is illus- 

 trated by four coloured plates, beautifully executed by the 

 late Mr. E. W. Robinson, in which thirty-two of the species 

 are figured. These two papers, filling about 200 pp. of the 

 society's Transactions, occupied me for several months, 

 and if I had not had wider and more varied interests — 

 evolution, distribution, physical geography, anthropology, 

 the glacial period, geological time, sociology, and several 



