"Now, if you do not credit me, Consult D'Aubigné's history. You'll find what I have told you Most fearfully and sternly true." Yale Literary Magazine, 1852.
(The Fritillaries, the Silver-spots)
"July is the gala-time of butterflies. Most of them have just left the chrysalis, and their wings are perfect and very fresh in color. All the sunny places are bright with them, yellow and red and white and brown, and great gorgeous fellows in rich velvet-like dresses of blue-black, orange, green, and maroon. Some of them have their wings scalloped, some fringed, and some plain; and they are ornamented with brilliant borders and fawn-colored spots and rows of silver crescents.... They circle about the flowers, fly across from field to field, and rise swiftly in the air; little ones and big ones, common ones and rare ones, but all bright and airy and joyous—a midsummer carnival of butterflies."—Frank H. Sweet.
Butterfly.—Butterflies of medium or large size, generally with the upper surface of the wings reddish-fulvous, with well-defined black markings consisting of waved transverse lines, and rounded discal and sagittate black markings near the outer borders. On the under side of the wings the design of the fore wings is generally somewhat indistinctly repeated, and the hind wings are marked more or less profusely with large silvery spots. In a few cases there is wide dissimilarity in color between the male and the female sex; generally the male sex is marked by the brighter red of the upper surface, and the female by the broader black markings, the paler ground-color, and the sometimes almost white lunules, which are arranged outwardly at the base of the sagittate spots along the border.
[a]Fig. 89.]—Neuration of the genus Argynnis.
The eyes are naked; the palpi strongly developed, heavily clothed with hair rising above the front, with the last joint very small and pointed. The antennæ are moderately long, with a well-defined, flattened club. The abdomen is shorter than the hind wings; the wings are more or less denticulate. The subcostal vein is provided with five nervules, of which the two innermost are invariably given forth before the end of the cell; the third subcostal nervule always is nearer the fourth than the second. The cell of the fore wing is closed by a fine lower discocellular vein, which invariably joins the median vein beyond the origin of the second nervule. The hind wing has a well-defined precostal nervule; the cell in this wing is closed by a moderately thick lower discocellular vein, which joins the median exactly at the origin of the second median nervule. The fore feet of the males are slender, long, and finely clothed with hair. The fore feet of the females are of the same size as those of the males, but thin, covered with scales, and only on the inner side of the tibiæ clothed with moderately long hair.
Egg.—The eggs are conoidal, truncated, and inwardly depressed at the apex, rounded at the base, and ornamented on the sides by parallel raised ridges, not all of which reach the apex. Between these ridges there are a number of small raised cross-ridges.