20 
GENERAL NOTES. 
Specimens of Ideopsis daos , Boisduval, are in the Brit. Mus. with locality “ Hongkong,” 
but either this is a mistake or they are importations, like the specimen of Hestia lynceus , Drury, 
which Commander Walker saw, taken on the wharf at Kowloon many years ago, and which he 
observes was obviously imported. Ideopsis and Hestia are genera which love deep, continuous 
forest, which does not exist here. Many butterflies, now characteristically Malayan and forest- 
dwellers were probably formerly common in S. China, before the hills were denuded of their forests 
by the Chinese, so that the heavy rains run off the hills like water from the roof of a house, scoring 
their flanks with deep and narrow crevices or small ravines, which are dry soon after the rain ceases. 
The Chinese have an excellent object-lesson before them in the re-afforestation of Hongkong and the 
New Territory, the latter now rapidly proceeding, but it is highly improbable they will profit by it. 
The daily round of hordes of dirty, unkempt children and numbers of goat-footed women is to set 
forth with choppers and bamboo rakes and collect everything available for fuel, twisting off a bough 
here and another there, sweeping up leaves and straws and even combing the grass, much of which 
is torn up by the roots. These goat-footed women do much of the field-work here, though debarred 
from rice-planting and catching fish on the tidal mud-flats, where they would sink helplessly ; but 
they may be seen cutting herbage right up on the hills. 
I am told that boxes of butterflies, arranged in wonderful figures and patterns, used at 
one time to be sold in Hongkong, but fortunately the utilitarian natives have not yet turned 
butterflies to account as the aborigines of Australia have, where a certain species of Euploea , which 
sometimes occurs in hosts, is used as food. But many other insects are utilized besides the silk- 
producers and other well-known creatures ; live grasshoppers and baked beetles and larvae, sold for 
feeding cagebirds; the crickets used for fighting, as gamecocks are in the Philippines and other 
countries; the large cicadas, captured in the wet season by men and children armed with a long 
bamboo smeared at the tip with birdlime. These “scissorgrinders” as Europeans here call them 
are kept in little bamboo cages, apparently for the pleasure of hearing them shrilling. But even 
the children take no heed of butterflies. 
Although the villages are generally surpassingly filthy, the immediate neighbourhood is 
little better, and a large geotrupid beetle does its best to cleanse the highways and byeways and also 
fertilise the soil, by burying excremental matter, but though one of the commonest beetles here, it 
is not numerous enough, even when assisted in its sanitary labours by the swine. Some butterflies 
occasionally exhibit a very depraved taste as regards their food, especially Char axes , and they never 
lack means to gratify their desires in this part of China. 
Wallace says the boundary of the Oriental and Palaearctic Regions on the coast of China 
appears to be somewhere in the neighbourhood of Foochow—or about midway between Hongkong 
and Shanghai and inland following the Nan-ling mountains, which divide the watersheds of the 
Yangtse and Si-kiang or West river, and separate Kiangsi and Hunan from Kwangtung. This 
range does not average more than three thousand feet in height and would perhaps hardly constitute 
a real barrier to the intermingling of the Palaearctic and Oriental faunas, but it forms an approximate 
boundary of the tropical or sub-tropical part of the Oriental Region in S. China; the Yangtse 
probably being a more natural boundary of the two Regions, though of course a hard-and-fast line 
cannot be drawn here, as is usually the case except where the barrier is a wide stretch of sea or desert 
or a high mountain range. 
