collections. But the female, as is often the case among butterflies, does not fly with the male and settles usually on high trees in the forest, and in consequence was so extremely rare that, though for years I had a standing offer of ten rupees for a perfect specimen, which represents about two months’ wages to a native, I never got one till I bought Mr. Wilson’s collection. My friend Knyvett, also a very keen collector, told me that the only female he ever saw until the food plant, which I believe to be Daphne cannabina, was discovered, was one which settled on the ground where he was playing lawn tennis, and which he did not see till he had put his foot upon it. But this butterfly has now been found not only in the Khasia hills and in Burma, but also in Western China, and remains practically without variation in all these places, the only repre¬ sentative of its genus in the world.
When Godman rejoined me at Darjeeling we started on December 15th for the interior with a party of twelve coolies, a bird collector who was with me on my last trip in 1876, and a man named Nimtien, formerly employed as a plant collector, whom I now promoted to be sirdar. We also had two servants, a pony and a syce. Lieutenant Harman of the Royal Engineers, who had been employed in surveying the Tibetan frontier, lent us a tent, and we had some Lepcha plant collectors from the Botanic Gardens to collect seeds and plants.
My principal object was to compare the distribution of the birds at this season with that which I had previously observed during the rainy season, and to find out to what extent the birds which breed at elevations above 10,000 feet descend to the lower valleys in winter. Our route lay across the Rangit valley and over the shoulder of the Tcndong mountain via Namchi to Temi in the Tista valley. On the way we met parties of Lepchas carrying heavy loads of sweet oranges from their villages in the Tista valley to Darjeeling. These oranges are, like those of the Khasia hills, largely exported to Calcutta, and are loose-skinned oranges of the Mandarin type. On the road we bought them very cheaply, twelve or sixteen for an anna, We also met parties of Nepalese carrying lime in baskets containing two maunds (160 pounds) each from Namchi to Dar¬ jeeling. It seems an immense load, but in this country a maund (80 pounds) is not thought too much for a woman or a boy. During one season, when there was cholera among the coolies and labour was scarce, the Nepalese women on my plantation volunteered to carry tea boxes, weigh¬ ing from 100 to 1 is pounds, on their backs up to Darjeeling, an ascent of over 4,000 feet by a steep slippery path. They begin as children to carry water in long bamboos with the joints broken out, from the stream to their houses, often a long way up the hillside. Though their muscles do not appear to develop as those of the men do, yet it seems that the actual physical strength of the female sex, among uncivilized races, is, like that of female horses, cattle and dogs, not much if at all inferior, in proportion to weight, to that of the male sex.
In the Tista valley at this season the climate was delightful, with a temperature varying from 50° to 70° according to the elevation. Birds were very numerous in the forest, and we got a good many which I had not previously shot myself. Hornbills, both of the large
