Introduction. 
Scientific zoologists as well as collectors who do not know East India from personal experience 
mostly connect with the name of this country the idea of an immense abundance of forms. In the picture 
which the layman draws for himself of an Indian landscape a luxurious growth of vegetation usually covers 
every spot of the ground, and lepidopterists who only know South Asia from the collections of dealers in 
“centuries”, so rich in individuals, are easily misled into the belief that any locality of India harbours an 
inexhaustible multitude of still undiscovered treasures for the collector, that every energetic collecting ex¬ 
pedition must bring an abundance of new discoveries and unprofitable day’s excursions be an impossibility there. 
But this is only very partially the case. Even the most popular tour through India, from Ceylon 
via Tuticorin to Madras — Bombay—Calcutta — Darjiling is enough to prove that East India is only here 
and there the luxurious dream-land which hovers before you when confined to our poor European soil, like 
a lost Paradise at an unattainable distance. For hours and days the way leads through regions which, 
planted in the most uniform manner with young cotton-plants and stripped of their primitive vegetation, 
resemble enormous potato-fields of the size of small kingdoms. Sometimes also on the Indian tableland the 
track goes through dry regions almost bare of plants, in crossing which you think yourself transplanted to 
the African deserts. The transition from these wastes into a magnificent valley, often a very Paradise of 
beauty, is at times quite unprepared for, and the suddenness of the change may tend to heighten the 
overwhelming impression which this new landscape makes upon you. 
As locally so seasonally also we meet sometimes with sharp contrasts. A South Indian 
landscape which we saw for the first time in the rainy season, when everything was green and flourishing, 
we should not recognise in the dry season. Thick white or red dust covers the leathery, yellowed leaves 
of the once fresh and attractive shrubs and trees. The beds of the rivers and brooks he dry and the hot, 
quivering atmosphere hangs leaden over the dead landscape. Only when the sun has set a part of the 
scanty animal world awakes to shy nocturnal life, to take refuge again in or on the ground as soon as the 
day-star rises in the cloudless blue sk} r . 
So also from the lepidopterist’s point of view India may be described as the land of contrasts. 
Locally we know of places where the fauna is exceedingly varied and rich in forms, and also of some 
where, at least during the greater part of the year, the butterfly world falls considerably behind the better 
European districts. Insignificant, pale-coloured, diminutive forms constitute the larger number of those 
which we meet with, as poor in beauty and colour as the joyless scenery which surrounds them. And so 
also the fauna of one and the same place is contrasted according to the time of year. India is the land 
of seasonal dimorphism, which occurs in a very large number of Lepidoptera in such a striking manner as 
is not found in any other region of the earth, with the exception of a few African districts. The wet- 
season forms are mostly larger, brighter, more deeply coloured, and often also more abundant than the 
corresponding dry-season forms. Also the dry-season forms mostly develop much more slowty than those 
of the wet-season, so that where the two seasons of the year are of equal length the wet-season produces 
more generations than the dry. 
It has already been said in the general introduction in the first volume that the Indo-Australian 
fauna is composed of two very different faunistic types, which however have been completely blended. 
The first type of fauna is the specifically Indian, which extends over all India with the whole of the 
Malayan islands. It. sends single offshoots into the Palaearctic Region, has its principal centre on the 
southern slopes of the Himalayas and in the Malayan islands, and coming from the north has spread far 
over Australia, forcibly driving the scanty Australian fauna, which forms the second tj'pe, towards the 
south. There remained then to this second type only the south and west of the Australian continent, 
Tasmania and (harbouring a last faunistic remnant) New Zealand. There in the extreme south, which is 
IX 1 
