Page:Jardine Naturalist's Library Foreign Butterflies.djvu/71

Rh specimens, and, in general, kept no record of their localities, or natural history properly so called. Collections from China and the East Indies were indiscriminately mixed, in their way homewards, with others from the Cape of Good Hope; and American species were in like manner mingled with such as are proper to the West Indian islands. Hence it followed, that Fabricius and others were so often led into error when they indicated the native country of the kinds they described: but, indeed, the author just named did not very frequently attempt this, but merely says, "From the Indies"—an expression which means nothing more explicit, in his acceptation of it, than that the species in question is exotic. Linnæus, also, when he uses the same word, means indiscriminately either the East or West Indies. The indications of localities in modern works are in general copious and accurate, but they have not hitherto been made the basis of any general and satisfactory view of the distribution of the species.

As might be expected in the case of animals endowed with considerable power of flight, certain kinds of diurnal lepidoptera have a much more extensive range than most other insects—than the coleoptera for example. It is now ascertained that Cynthia cardui, a species well known throughout Europe, (without confounding it, as may sometimes have been done, with the kindred species C. Hunteri), occurs in Senegal, Egypt, Barbary, Cape of Good Hope, in the islands of Bourbon and