62 
SOUTH-AFRICAN BUTTERFLIES. 
Pupa. — Sharply angulated, slender, head beaked. Light-brown, i 
varied with darker-brown ; a white, pink-spotted, longitudinal stripe j 
on abdominal segments. Kepresented as suspended to the stalk of j 
some plant. 
The above descriptions of larva and pupa are made from figures in Plate 
xii. (f. 9, 9a.) of Horsfield and Moore's Catalogue of Lepidoptera in the East 
India Company's Museum, vol. i. The food-plant of the larva is not stated, | 
nor is its locality given. 
Colonel Yerbury, quoted by Mr. Butler in Proc. Zool. Soc. Lo7id., 
1884, p. 492, and 1886, p. 376, notes that near Aden he had reared j 
caterpillars of this butterfly (" Zordaca, Walk.") on Capparis galeata, and 
that in Western India they feed on a Capparis with dark-red blossom 
{C. horrida). 
Mr. W. D. Gooch's notes and outline sketches of the earlier stages 
of Mesentina near D'Urban, in Natal, agree very fairly with the figures 
above described, and may be thus summarised, viz. : — j 
Larva. — Yellowish olive-green on back, marked down the middle 
with a double dark-brownish line ; on each side a deep citrine-green 
stripe, bearing on each segment a minute yellow spot, — these lateral 
stripes inflect a little on eleventh segment, and join dorsally at their 
extremities on twelfth segment ; below lateral stripes yellowish-green ; 
just above legs with whitish-grey pubescence, inclining to form a tuft 
on each segment ; on second segment two longer subdorsal tufts of 
similar hair projecting above the head. Head bright reddish-brown. 
Pupa. — Very light-brownish, dorsally flecked with dark-brown ; 
edges of wing- covers and part of neuration dark ; angular projections 
on each side of dorsal base of abdomen black ; lateral streaks of abdo- 
men, and line along median dorsal carina of thorax white. Form quite 
like that of the pupa of Severina, Cram. 
This well-known species has a wide range over all the Ethiopian region 
(except, apparently, the tropical north-west forest sub-region), and over South- 
West Asia, from Syria to Calcutta. In South Africa it seems to be far more 
numerous in the uplands of the interior than on the coast. In hiatal during 
the summer of 1867 I met with only four specimens; and not many examples 
have reached me in collections made in that Colony. Colonel Bowker described 
it as very numerous all over Basutoland, and Mr. H. L. Feltham informs me 
that in Griqualand West it is by far the most abundant species of the genus. 
Two stragglers of this butterfly have been recorded by me as visiting Cape 
Town, — the first taken in the Museum enclosure in April 1873, and a second, 
closely observed by myself for some time, on 14th April 1878, about flowers in 
the Botanic Gardens. Several times, however, in the later summer I have 
seen on Table Mountain a "White" hurrying past, which, although I could 
not identify it, was clearly not the only resident species, P. Hellica, and very 
probably was Mesentina. The species has occurred in all the collections I have 
seen from Damaraland ; in a small one formed by Mr. John A. Bell there were 
as many as thirty-eight specimens of it. Boisduval (op. cit., p. 502) notes that 
in some parts of Africa this butterfly at certain seasons migrates in innumerable 
hosts, but he gives no authority for the statement. Colonel Bowker noticed in 
Basutoland that numbers of Mesentina flew in an eastward direction. 
