Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections (V. 141 1961)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1907 Excerpt: ...America and southern Asia (pi. Lxiii, fig. 33). The wide occurrence of these vestiges, which are clearly remnants of a split-back condition of the vein Rt, renders entirely justifiable the interpretation of similar structures in related forms as homologous and signifying the same condition. These vestiges occur in all families and in the following examples they are especially well marked: Epargyreus tityrus of the Hesperidae; Papilio polyxenes of the Papilionidae; Parnassius smitheus of the Parnassidae; Hypatus bachmani of the Libytheidae; Anosia plexippus of the Danaidae; Leucothyris quinatina of the Neotropidae; Apostraphia charithonia of the Heliconidae; Semnopsyche diana and Euphydryas phaeton of the Nymphalidae; Catoblepia sp. of the Brassolidae; Morpho sp. of the Morphidae; Erebia tyndarns of the Satyridae; Anthocharis sara of the Pieridae; Arhopala hercules of the Lycaenidae (pis. Lx-lxiii, figs. 18, 22, 34, 35, 12, 38, 14, 13, 37, 36, 39, 40, 32 and 33). I have cited only a few of the examples available and, while they show how widely this modification is scattered through the groups, they show nothing of its prevalence among the members of the individual families, and consequently nothing very conclusive as to its history and significance. In order to get light on this point I carefully examined the mounted and photographed wings of 171 species, representing 158 genera and 16 families of Rhopalocera. These wings were taken from specimens representing all the life zones of the world, a majority being secured from North, Central, and South America. This latter fact does not impair the universal nature of the evidence for South America alone, according to Staudinger and Schatz ('85),1 possesses 272 genera represented by 4,500 species, or about one-hal...