The three nights of our stay in Tonglo on the way back were even more productive of moths than at first, and yielded a rich and varied collection, some of the insects being of large size and splendid colouring. The heat, however, of the sun, even at this elevation, is so great, and the absence of cold winds at night so marked in the rainy season, that the climate is well suited to nocturnal insects. A curious red flying squirrel (Pteromys magnificus), two feet in length, was brought in by one of the forest guards during our stay here, giving another of the numerous instances of the prevalence of tropical forms at high elevations in Sikkim. The trees at 6,ooo to 7,000 feet are now becoming gay with the flowers of a large yellow epiphytical Roscœa, which I believe to be Lutea. There is another much smaller plant of the same character growing with it, or perhaps 1,000 feet lower down, called also R. Lutea by some; flowering a month earlier, it has now bright red berries enclosed by blue capsules, and differs in this respect so much from Roscœa that it must, I think, be placed in another genus.
The absence of any catalogue of the Sikkim monocotyledonous plants, however, makes it impossible to name them with accuracy except at Kew, though the approaching completion of the Flora Indica will soon, it is to be hoped, enable all the beautiful Scitamineæ, Orchids and Aroids of these hills to be named as certainly as those orders which have already been described in that invaluable work. The return journey to Darjeeling was marked by no incident of importance. A splendid fresh female of Papilio muciercus was captured on the road at about 8,000 feet, showing that there are two broods of this fine forest insect. A single male of the lovely and very local Raphicera satricus was also taken at about the same level. On the whole, I think that I never enjoyed a more pleasant or profitable week's excursion in any part of the world with so little fatigue or inconvenience.
Some of the new Lepidoptera taken by me on this trip were described in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society for 1887; some in a catalogue of the Lepidoptera of Sikkim in the Transactions of the Entomological Society for 1888, pp. 269–465; and a large number of moths in a list of the Heterocera of Sikkim which Mr. Duthrie and I commenced in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society. Sir George Hampson described the greater part of the moths in The Fauna of British India; and the collection which I afterwards disposed of to Lord Rothschild contained the types of about 350 species which were added to the Indian list of my collection.
