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Show 40 MR. H. J. ELWES ON THE GENUS PARNASSIUS. [J a botanist of St. Petersburg, in the Tarbagatai and Allakan Mountains." l It has since been taken abundantly by Alpheraky in the Thian Shan Mountains, above 9000 feet elevation, in July and August. It frequents steep stony mountains up to 12,000 feet, where there are great abundance of Saxifrages. Haberhauer also took it in the Alatau, and in the Sultan Hazret mountains, south of Samarkand, which form the western termination of the Alatau, in great quantity between the 10th June and the beginning of August. This last was described by Herr Bang-Haas as P. staudingeri, but after having seen large numbers of the two forms, three pairs of each of which are in m y collection, I fail to find any difference by which they may be distinguished. Both are very variable, but both have the antennae, fringes of the wing, pouch of the female, and all important characters absolutely identical. Bang-Haas relies principally on the supposed broader fore wings, and the purer yellowish white ground-colour with much sharper blacker markings ; but when he wrote he had not yet received the specimens of P. delphius, collected in Ferghana by Haberhauer, which vary extremely. Some of these (? var. namagana) have blue ocelli on the hind wing, as in stoliczkanus. Some of the females of P. staudingeri (var. infernalis, Stgr.) are very dark, almost black in their ground colour. The antennae in this species are in the male sex black, but in all my six females the lower part is more or less grey, not distinctly ringed. The fringes are very narrow, whitish in colour, but sometimes darker; and, as Bang-Haas points out, the horny substance of the pouch forms a complete ring round the hinder segment of the body. Dr. Staudinger says it varies from a uniform grey colour with feebly marked blackish spots to a very dark colour with reddish-yellow, red, or yellow ocelli on the hind wings, and in one specimen two small red spots on the costal margin. The bluish scales of the two black round ocelli on the hind wing also seem to be often wanting in the freshest specimens. I noted in his collection a very curious looking organ protruding from the abdomen of a male specimen of P. staudingeri, which, having some analogy in shape to the pouch of the female, led Dr. Staudinger to think it was a hermaphrodite. This organ, however, which, owing to his kind loan of the specimen, I am able to figure (Plate II. fig. 14), is I believe only the ordinary male claspers protruded from the body, perhaps owing to forcible separation from the female. P. STOLICZKANUS. Parnassius stoliczkanus, Feld. Reise Novara, Lep ii p. 138 (1865), iii. t. 67. figs. 2, 3 (1867). With regard to P. stoliczkanus we know but little, as it is an inhabitant of remote and inaccessible districts in Ladak and the northern frontier of the North-west Himalaya. The late Dr. Stoliczka 1 Perhaps this is a misprint for Alatau, as I can find no such name in the best modern maps. |