which we could not find while the other was a good specimen. Gammie has since told me that these were the only ones he ever saw or heard during his many years' residence at Mongpo.
The same remarks apply to many kinds of butterflies and moths, as I shall show later, but I may here mention one remarkable case which happened in May, 1886. I was riding through the virgin forest at about 6,000 feet on the road from Darjeeling to Mongpo, and as the day was misty and drizzling, I had seen few butterflies. As I passed over a bridge on the road I noticed a small blue butterfly and I dismounted to catch it. I found that it was a species unknown to me, but before the gleam of sunshine which had brought it out passed by I got two more. I described it as Chilades pontis, in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society for May 3rd, 1887. But though I sent a native collector to stay some days at the same spot, where he got a good many males, I never got a female for years afterwards; and the only place where a similar butterfly has since been found is in China, where Leech discovered a nearly allied species at Ningpo. I have since obtained a third in Central Formosa, so that the only three known forms of this peculiar genus are separated from each other by intervals of over a thousand miles. These are the facts which add so much to the interest of collecting, when the collector is well acquainted with the distribution of the objects he seeks and is able to recognise the scientific interest of even such insignificant little objects as these.
Before coming up to Darjeeling, Godman made a trip to Buxa, a hill station in the lower hills of Bhutan, a hundred miles east of Darjeeling, in the hopes of finding a butterfly of extraordinary beauty and rarity, which had been discovered some years previously by Dr. Lidderdale when quartered there with a native infantry regiment, and which had been described and figured by Hewitson as Bhutanitis Lidderdalii. This beautiful butterfly is black with white stripes and three long tails on each hind wing. Godman was unsuccessful in his search, as he was unable to reach the spot where it was supposed to be found. My friend Mandelli was also very anxious to obtain this butterfly, and on three separate occasions sent two of his best Lepcha collectors to Buxa during the rainy season provided with guns, money and a letter to the police to give them what help they could. On the first occasion they both got fever and returned sick; on the second expedition one was killed by a tiger and the other would not remain alone; on the third the Bhutanese robbed them and frightened them away. And so our collections remained without a single specimen, until my friend Doherty discovered the butterfly in the Naga hills at Mao near the Manipur frontier and gave an account of its habits.
Another of the beautiful butterflies which was for a long time only known at Darjeeling is Teinopalpus imperialis. It is a very strong flying species which comes out during the rainy season near Darjeeling and flies rapidly round and round small open spaces on the tops of hills like Sinchul at 7,000 to 8,000 feet whenever the sun shines, though this is often not for days together. The native collectors used to lay down baits of some dead animal or stinking garbage at these well-known flying places, and watch them for hours together, so that the male was not very rare in
