2 
INTRODUCTION. 
a perusal of Mr. W. F. Kirby’s more receut ‘ Synonymic Catalogue 
of Diurnal Lepidoptera.’ 
Tbougli it is my intention only to figure and describe the 
Butterflies of Europe, yet in following Staudinger I shall, for 
the sake of completeness, add to the description of each family 
group a short notice of the extra-European species included by him 
in his work, most of these being closely allied to our European 
forms. The region or territory of the European Fauna as under- 
stood by him extends over a very large area of the Northern 
Hemisphere, comprising the whole of Europe and of North Asia 
as far as the liiver Amour, Persia, Armenia, and Asia Minor, with 
a considerable portion of North Africa bordering on the Mediter- 
ranean, and in the Polar Eegions, Labrador, and Greenland. 
This zoological area corresponds very nearly to the “ Palse- 
arctic Eegion” of Mr. Wallace, omitting his fourth or Oriental 
subregion, and with the addition of that part which belongs to 
Polar America. 
It is difficult to say whether either of these theoretical 
divisions has any advantage over the other ; in fact, I believe that 
the only satisfactory way of solving this question with regard to 
our present subject would be to unite the Paltearctic and Nearctic 
regions proposed by Wallace, in his ‘ Geographical Distribution of 
Animals,’ in one great Eegion, and so to include the greater 
portion of the extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere of the world, 
for it cannot be denied that there is a great analogy between the 
species belongiug to North America and those of Europe and 
Northern Asia. 
The limits of the present work would not, however, permit 
me to treat of such an extensive region as the one suggested, even 
