Page:Jardine Naturalist's Library Foreign Butterflies.djvu/186

152 VANESSA ORITHYA.

PLATE XV. Fig. 3.

very elegant species, which is a native of China and the island of Java, is subject to much variation in its colour and markings. In its most ordinary state the colour of the surface is velvet-black in the male and dark brown in the female, with two large ocelli on each wing having a violet-blue pupil and a yellowish-red iris. The costa of the primary wings is generally dull white, and towards the base are two or three transverse stripes alternately blue and tawny-yellow; towards the apex are three whitish bands, the interior one broadest, the middle one interrupted by the ocellus, the third narrow and lying along the external margin. The secondary wings are surrounded by a white band divided throughout its whole length by a double undulating black line; the space between this band and the middle of the wing bluish-green in the male, a colour which scarcely appears in the female, and the anterior portion generally black in the former sex. Under side pale, the transverse stripes much elongated and