The primal curse declared that the earth, because of man's sin, should bring forth thorns and thistles, and thistles are almost everywhere. Wherever thistles grow, there is found the thistle-butterfly, or the "Painted Lady," as English collectors are in the habit of calling it, Pyrameis cardui. All over Europe, all over North America, in Africa,—save in the dense jungles of the Congo,—throughout South America, in far-off Australia, and in many of the islands of the sea this beautiful butterfly is found. At some times it is scarce, and then again there are seasons when it fairly swarms, every thistle-top having one of the gaily colored creatures seated upon its head, and among the thorny environment of the leaves being found the web which the caterpillar weaves. Another butterfly which bids fair ultimately to take possession of the earth is our own Anosia plexippus, the wanderings of which have already been alluded to.
Many species are found in the arctic regions both of the Old World and the New. Obscure forms are these, and lowly in their organization, survivors of the ice-age, hovering on the borderline of eternal frost, and pointing to the long-distant time when the great land-masses about the northern pole were knit together, as geologists teach us.
One of the curious phenomena in the distribution of butterflies is the fact that in Florida we find Hypolimnas misippus, a species which is exceedingly common in Africa and in the Indo-Malayan subregion. Another curious phenomenon of a like character is the presence in the Canary Islands of a Pyrameis, which appears to be only a subvariety of the well-known Pyrameis indica, which is common in India, southern China, and Japan. Away off in southeastern Africa, upon the peaks and foot-hills which surround the huge volcanic masses of Kilima-Njaro, Kenia, and Ruwenzori, was discovered by the martyred Bishop Hannington a beautiful species of Argynnis, representing a genus nowhere else found upon the continent of Africa south of Mediterranean lands. Strange isolation this for a butterfly claiming kin to the fritillaries that sip the sweets from clover-blossoms in the Bernese Oberland, in the valleys of Thibet, and on the prairies of the United States.
Genus JUNONIA, Hübner (Peacock Butterflies),
Butterfly.—Medium-sized butterflies, with eye-like spots upon the upper wings. Their neuration is very much like that of the butterflies belonging to the genus Pyrameis, to which they are closely allied. The eyes are naked, the fore feet are scantily clothed with hair, and the lower discocellular vein of the fore wing, when present, does not terminate on the arch of the third median nervule before its origin, as in the genus Vanessa, but immediately at the origin of the third median nervule.
[a]Fig. 98.]—Neuration of the genus Junonia.
Egg.—Broader than high, the top flattened, marked by ten vertical ribs, very narrow, but not very high. Between the ribs are a few delicate cross-lines.
Caterpillar.—The caterpillar is cylindrical, the segments being adorned with rows of branching spines and longitudinally striped.
Chrysalis.—The chrysalis is arched on the dorsal surface and marked by two rows of dorsal tubercles, concave on the ventral side. The head is slightly bifid, with the vertices rounded.