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Show 1886.] MR. H. J. EEWES ON THE GENUS I'ARNASSIUS. 9 and P. mnemosyne dissolved when boiled in the same chemical, leaving only brown oily drops. The alkali was then saturated with mineral acid, but nothing organic was separated from it, whence we must conclude that the originally dissolved substance was destroyed. Siebold compares the pouch of P. hardwickei, which he saw in the Vienna collection, with that of P. mnemosyne, from which, however, as I have afterwards shown, it is very different. He also compares the pouch of P. delius with that of P. apollo, and says that it agrees in colour, texture, and shape, wanting only the sharp keel. In this, however, he was mistaken, as I have never seen a specimen of P. delius, or of any species of this group, in which the keel was absent, though in P. jacquemonti, which Siebold could hardly have seen, it is so. He then describes the observations of Herr Reutti, of Freiburg, who undertook the rearing of P. apollo from the larva in order to prove the correctness of Siebold's views. On May 29 he collected fifty larvee, which had mostly undergone their last moult, on Sedum album. He describes them as being very troublesome to rear, because the larvse, though feeding greedily when placed on the plants, would not return to the food of their own will, owing to the want of sunshine in a room of north aspect. He succeeded, however, in rearing 11 larvse, which went into pupse under plants or stones, and in one case in an angle of the cover of the cage in a slight web of spun threads; "within this the larva hung by the hind feet in the manner of a Vanessa; the pupa, however, lay free in the web." Reutti succeeded in rearing four pairs of the butterfly, one of which, on July 17 at 1 P.M., united, and remained in coitu until late at night; next morning they were separate, and the female had a perfect pouch ; but no observation was made of its formation. Siebold thinks that the keel in the pouch of P. apollo is produced as follows: " B y observing the male genital organs of P. apollo, it seems to me that the coagulating secretion is poured out under the two lateral valves, which, on the end of the abdomen of the male beneath, keep the proper genitals embraced, so that these latter, after coagulation of the pouch-forming secretion, are found in the interior of the pouch, whilst the valves are pressed agamst the outside of the vault of the pouch, and part of the coagulated matter stands out between them as the above-mentioned keel." Lastly, Siebold quotes Kollar for an extraordinary story about the larvse of P. mnemosyne, which aie preserved in the Imperial Collection at Vienna, resembling those of P. apollo in habit, colours, markings, and which are " not seldom found on recently dead horses in the lower mountain valleys of Austria and Hungary " ! ! ! On the same evening that this paper was read, I had hoped that Prof. Howes would have been able to give us the result of his examination of the specimens preserved at the Society's Gardens as hereafter mentioned ; but Prof. Howes having been delayed by illness and press of other work, his observations will form the subject of a later |
