278 
WEST INDIES AND SOUTH AMEEICA 
the English visitor either winter or early spring, but rather a fine, 
hot, late autumn, with burnt-up, gone-to-seed herbage, and falling 
leaves. The quiet and solitude of the woods was surprising, so that 
the falling of a big leaf, such as are common in the tropics, would 
make clatter enough upon the path to give one a start. Often where 
trees and varied undergrowth little disturbed by cultivation sug¬ 
gested a profusion of insects, scarcely any were found. Not only 
were butterflies scarce, but beetles, bees, wasps, and especially 
flies. There is a note in my diary for February 16th: “ Christiana. 
Caught a wasp, the first seen since Constant Spring” (January 14). 
During that month I took but some half a dozen flies. Mr. P. H. 
Gosse, in his altogether admirable “Naturalist’s Sojourn in Jamaica,” 
expresses his surprise at the scarcity of insects, in words that merit 
quotation. “I had left England with high expectations of the 
richness of the West Indian entomology: large and gaily-coloured 
beetles, I supposed, would be crawling on almost every shrub, gor¬ 
geous butterflies be filling the air, moths be swarming about the 
forest-edges at night, and caterpillars be beaten from every bush. 
These expectations were far from being realized: ... in general 
butterflies are to be obtained only casually. Moths are still more 
rare ... in general beetles and the other orders are extremely 
scarce, and especially Diptera: I have often been astonished at the 
paucity of these, as compared with their abundance in Canada and 
the Southern United States. . . . One may often walk a mile,—I do 
not mean in the depth of the forest, but in situations comparatively 
open, beneath an unclouded sun,—and not see more than a dozen 
specimens of all orders ” (pp. 94, 95). 
Between sixty and seventy species of butterflies 1 occur in 
Jamaica, and it is a surprising fact that such a large tropical island 
should not produce more species than Great Britain. During my 
ten weeks’ collecting I obtained forty-seven species, as compared 
with thirty-six species that are to be found in the one Devonshire 
parish of Mortehoe. Indeed for the most part I found Jamaica 
poorer in butterflies than Mortehoe in the summer. There were but 
two occasions on which the numbers were comparable. 
On the afternoon of February 25th I was ferried over from Port 
Antonio to Navy Island. The Trade-wind was blowing rather 
strongly, and the only sheltered spot was some swampy ground to 
the leeward of a bluff; here Anartia jatrophae was in the greatest 
profusion, many being busy about the flowers of the Logwood-trees 
1 The negroes always call butterflies “ bats,” a term that for some time greatly 
puzzled me. 
