242 
SOUTH-AFRICAN BUTTERFLIES. 
enclosure, but they were promptly seized by the ever-watchful butcher- 
bird, Lanius collaris. 
It has been with considerable hesitation that I have separated 
this Papilio, under Doubleday's name of Lyoeus, from the well-known 
Nirev.s, Linn., notwithstanding that Doubleday has been followed in 
this by several authors. There can be no doubt that Linne's original 
description of Nireus applies to the well-known butterfly from the ' 
coast of Western Africa figured by Clerck and Drury, and by Cramer 
on his Plate 187, ff. A, b.-^ The form figured by the latter as the J 
of the Nii^eiis depicted in the plate named — which is itself a $ — will 
be found on Plate 378, ff. F, G, and is a rather small $ from South 
Africa, exhibiting very clearly the differences more or less distinctly 
presented in specimens inhabiting that part of the continent. These 
differences are : i °, shorter wings, the fore- wings not so pointed apically, 
the hind-wings not so produced inferiorly (and with shorter and j 
rounder dentations); 2°, the common stripe decidedly bluer, usually ■ 
rather broader in fore-wing, and considerably narrower and shorter at \ 
its termination in hind-wing (where in Nireus the portion between \ 
second and first median nervides is mncli enlarged and elongated^ and 
extends along npper side of first median nervule considerably heyond the \ 
portion heloiv that nervule^^ — just the reverse of what is seen in Lyoeus) \ \ 
3°, the submarginal spots in hind-wing usually larger, more elongate, 
and more numerous ; and, on the under side of the ^, 4°, the paler 
hind-wing and apical area of fore-wing, and the presence in both I 
of some broad shining-greyish clouding (wholly wanting in Nireus) ; I 
and 5°, the wider and continuous shining- creamy submarginal stripe 
(which in Nireus is throughout broken into spots both by nervules and 
inter-nervular folds). 
The upper- side differences are very constant, and so also is the I 
under-side one of the continuous hind-wing stripe ; but specimens of ! 
the $ occur in Natal, Zululand, Transvaal, and especially Delagoa 
Bay, in which the shining-greyish clouding of the under side is more 
or less reduced, and sometimes almost obsolete. 
M. C. Oberthur {Ann. Mus. Civ. di Genova, xv. p. 147, 1880), 
while distinguishing between Nireus and Lycetcs, and rightly pointing ' 
out the application to them respectively of Cramer's different figures, [ 
still supposes (as he had previously intimated in his Mudes d'Untomo- 
logic, liv. iii. p. 13, 1878) that Nireus (Cramer's PI. 187, A, b) is the 
form spread through all the southern parts of Africa, and that Lyoeus\ 
(Cramer's PI. 378 r, g) is peculiar to countries north of the Equator; 
but, as I have abundantly shown, it is the latter that inhabits all| 
South Africa proper, and as M. Oberthiir records that all the Abyssinian I 
1 The late Mr. G. R. Gray evidently took the opposite view ; for in both his British 
Museum Catalogues of Papilionidae (1852 and 1856) he gave the Linnean Nireus as the 
Southern form, and proposed the new name of Erinus for the West-Coast one. 1 
^ This character is also prominent in the closely-allied P. Bromius, Doubl., from West 
Africa, distinguished from Nireus by its much wider bluish-green stripes. 
