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Show 296 MR. P. CROWLEY ON PUP* FROM NATAL. [May 18, be necessary for me to revisit the islands, when I shall commence at the southernmost Atoll, and hope to gradually work m y way north. I hope to leave next September on m y second journey. The Ethnographical collection which I was able to bring back is now exhibited in the Ceylon Court of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, and this has taken up so much of m y time that I have so far been unable to classify and arrange my zoological specimens. A short paper descriptive of m y stay on Male Atoll will shortly be read before the Royal Geographical Society. " The zoology of the Maldives is not of importance so far as animals are concerned. Domestic animals have been imported from India ; and there are at present bullocks, cows, sheep, and goats on the islands ; the first named, however, are few in number, and all belong to the Sultan; but the last are reared by the Maldivians, and there are about five hundred of them on Male Atoll. There are a few cats, and former writers on the Maldives mention the presence of the Mongoose; but I saw none on Male Atoll, and all the natives with whom I came in contact told me they had never seen any. Flying-foxes are numerous and very destructive, but their ravages are eclipsed by those of the cocoa-nut rats, who destroy thousands of nuts yearly. I found a kind of musk-rat, with black-and-white fur and a pointed tail, in large numbers. " I brought with me a large number of lizards, ground-snakes, beetles, butterflies, fish, sea-animals, and corals, of which I am only able to show a small number to-night. " The fauna of the Maldives, i. e. of the Northern Atolls, is very similar to that of India and Ceylon ; I have been given to understand, on the other hand, that on the Southern Atolls it resembles that of Mauritius, the Seychelles, and Madagascar. Birds and butterflies are only seen at certain seasons; the north-east monsoon brings these from India and Ceylon, which are then to be found on most islands of the Northern Atolls, whilst during the south-west monsoon species from Mauritius &c. are brought to the Southern Atolls. " The Maldive Islands are nearly all of coral-formation. I found several pieces of lava and pumice-stone on the sea-shore ; but these evidently came from Java at the time of the great eruption and earthquake there, as the natives assured me they had only been seen for the last two or three years." Mr. Philip Crowley, F.Z.S., exhibited some pupse of Nocturnal Lepidoptera from Natal, and made the following observations: - " Some few months since, when Mr. Thomson exhibited some large specimens of Saturniidse hatched in the Gardens from pupse received from South Africa, I asked if any one present could tell me whether these species were subterranean in their pupa state, and I could get no satisfactory answer ; one or two said they believed they spun up in the leaves of the food-plant. M y Natal correspondent was therefore asked to send me some cocoons. I received his reply some six weeks since, and a consignment of pupa? on Monday the 18th, some of which I now exhibit. In his letter he says:-'The larvae of all our big |
