1881.] Butterflies of the Genera Ornithoptera and Papilio. 25 



but its distal moiety is free, projected, and antagonised to that of its 

 opposite fellow. 



It is in this free portion that the wondrous variety mainly resides ; 

 and the equally wondrous perfection of elaborate armature. It 

 simulates, with curious precision, our knives, swords, sickles, axes, 

 saws, and pikes, straight, angled, or curved ; now furnished with one 

 or more acute needle-points, now bearing a keen cutting edge, now 

 cut into spinous teeth, now with each tooth notched into secondary 

 minuter teeth ; sometimes it is a broad disk, beset with conical 

 prickles, sometimes a long elastic wire ; besides many other forms, 

 simple and compound, for which our human implements afford no 

 comparisons. 



That the proper specific office of these elaborate contrivances is the 

 prehension of the female during the copulative act, is not left to bo 

 conjectured ; for they often carry documentary evidence that they have 

 been so employed. Very often, when a valve is exposed, the arma- 

 ture is quite invisible, because the cavity is wholly filled with a brown 

 deposit, caked into a solid mass. This, when put on a slip of glass 

 with a drop of water, under the microscope, is presently resolved into 

 a multitude of body clothing- scales, clogged together with dried 

 remains of what had been the anal fluid (meconium) of some female 

 butterfly ; that brown fluid which is always discharged soon after 

 evolution from pupa. In such a case, conjunction had been effected 

 with a female just evolved ; the serrate harpe-claws of the male had 

 scraped off a crowd of scales in the efforts to obtain prehension ; 

 while the excitement had caused the female to discharge the meco- 

 nium at the same moment. And here remained the stereotyped 

 record ! 



3. The Uncus. — The dorsal arch of the eighth abdominal segment 

 terminates, generally, in a slender spine of polished, elastic chitine, 

 which, continuing the medial line, projects backward, and arches down, 

 so as to form a (more or less) semicircular hook. To this I appro- 

 priate the term Uncus. Its office seems to be to secure a vertical grasp 

 of the female organs, which are simultaneously grasped, laterally, by 

 the right and left harpes. But the shape, direction, curvature, 

 texture, and adjuncts of this organ vary exceedingly ; and sometimes 

 it is altogether lacking . 



4. The Scaphium. — This is an organ to which I have not been able 

 to find distinct allusion in any author. In the other families of 

 Bhopalocera it seems altogether wanting.* Yet, in the Papilionidce 

 proper, it is generally large, conspicuous, and complicate. If we 

 remove the valve of Ornithoptera Haliphron, or Papilio Pammon, the 



* Save in the Pieridce. In the South American Gonepteryges, Clorinde, and 

 Leachiana, it is well formed, but minute : in the Oriental Hebomoia Glaucippe, 

 moderately large, but peculiar : it becomes evanescent in Terias. 



