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Show 28 MR. H. J. ELWES ON THE GENUS PARNASSIUS. [Jan. 19, the genus: a fine female specimen from Dahuria in the St. Petersburg Museum has the fore wings almost free from white scales and the cell yellowish. I possess two females from the Amur which have a faint yellow tinge all over the white parts of the wings, as is sometimes seen in very fresh Alpine and Himalayan specimens. I think this fades very soon after the insect emerges from the chrysalis. Some specimens have two or three of the black spots on fore wing pupilled with red, as in typical P. delius. The ocelli of the hind wing are sometimes with and sometimes without white pupils, but I have seen no specimen which cannot be at once recognized as P. nomion. Of the habits and life-history of this species we know nothing at present ; but it does not seem to be a high-mountain insect, but rather an inhabitant of wooded hilly regions, where it flies in July. Schaufuss, in a publication called ' Numquam Otiosus,' published at Dresden in 1877, on pp. 417-424, after describing two varieties of P. nomion under the names of venusi and virgo, attempts to make an analytical table of the genus Parnassius ; but this, depending alone on such variable characters as the colours and pattern of the wings, results in an unnatural and unreliable arrangement of the genus, in which no attention whatever is given to structural characters. The publication of such papers is in m y opinion of no advantage to science. As the number of recognized entomological journals is already too great, and the difficulty of reference to such a one as this almost insuperable to foreigners, one has at least a right to expect that after so much trouble as these references give, something worth notice should be found. Short papers of no value are becoming too numerous. P. ACTIUS. Parnassius actius, Eversmann, Bull. Mosc. 1843, iii. p. 540, t. ix. figs. 2 a, b; Staudinger, Stett. ent. Zeit. 1881, p. 278 ; Alpheraky, Lep. Kuldja, p. 23 (1881). Var. rhodius, Honrath, Bed. ent. Zeit. 1882, p. 178, t. ii. fig. 6, 1885, p. 274. This is a very puzzling species to assign to its proper position in the classification of the genus ; for though it undoubtedly appears to have minor characters which entitle it to be recognized as a species in the high mountains of Northern and Eastern Turkestan, yet I cannot specify any by which it can be constantly distinguished from P. discobolus ; and the form which has been described as rhodius is so like the corresponding sex of P. jacquemonti, that I am unable to distinguish between them in the male sex, and do not know for certain whether P. actius exists at all in Ladak or the Himalayas, whence no female corresponding to it with a keeled pouch has yet come under my notice. It is, however, distinct from the form I have called himalay-ensis, of which a large series constantly differs in the greater blackness of the antennae, which, though ringed, are in many cases almost entirely black, whilst in P. actius from Turkestan, in P. jacquemonti, and P. discobolus they are, as far as my specimens go, always distinctly ringed with white. On the underside it perfectly agrees |
