LI.â��Note on the appearance in Australia of the Danais Archippus

440 On the Appearance ©/"Danais Archippus in Australia. LI. — Note on the Appearance in Australia of the Danais Archippus. Bj Frederick M'Coy, Professor of Natural Science in the Melbourne University, and Director of the National Museum of Victoria, &c. This fine butterfly was sent to me about December 1870 from Lord Howe's Island, on the north-east coast of Australia, by a collector for the museum who was wrecked there 5 but as I had never seen it in any of the North-Australian, or Queens-land, or New-South-Wales collections, and knew it to be an inhabitant of the Southern States of America, I suspected that the specimen might have been obtained from some collector on board some American ship in those seas. A few months after, a specimen was sent to me by a collector established on the Clarence River, in New South Wales, as something he had not seen before, and another friend fond of insects, travelling in the far north of the continent, also sent me an example as something strange. As there were no exact accounts of the actual capture of these specimens, I fancied they all might have come from some one American source, and paid little attention to the matter. On the last Sunday in April last (or about a year and five months after) I was walking in my garden at Brighton, a place on the sea-shore about eight miles south of Melbourne, and was astonished to see that a larger butterfly, with a more bat-like flight than any inhabitant of the colony, which attracted my attention amongst the flower-buds, was the Danais Archipj^us ; and presently the two sexes were seen. Being Sunday they escaped ; but next morning, going through the grounds of the University on the north side of Melbourne to the Museum to make the teeth water of my assistant (who had collected Lepidoptera for twenty years in Victoria) by mentioning what I had seen, I ob-served two more before me, and on going to my room found the collector in a great state of excitement at having caught one in my botanic garden in the University grounds, and having the previous day seen one five miles south of Brighton. So that the insect had made its appearance for the first time in the colony simultaneously at places fourteen miles apart, and with no community of character or vegetation — Brighton and to the south being a sandy bush in a state of nature, with houses few and far between, each surrounded by several acres of land, while about the University is a clay soil, densely populated. On the three following Sundays I saw two or three specimens in fine condition, which could not, therefore, liave been those seen at first ; and last week I saw some in the street leading to the LTniversity ; and on the same day the col-

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LI.—Note on the appearance in Australia of the Danais Archippus

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