Many species are found in the arctic regions both of the Old World and the New. Obscure forms are these, and lowly in their organization, survivors of the ice-age, hovering on the borderline of eternal frost, and pointing to the long-distant time when the great land-masses about the northern pole were knit together, as geologists teach us.
One of the curious phenomena in the distribution of butterflies is the fact that in Florida we find _Hypolimnas misippus_, a species which is exceedingly common in Africa and in the Indo-Malayan subregion. Another curious phenomenon of a like character is the presence in the Canary Islands of a _Pyrameis_, which appears to be only a subvariety of the well-known _Pyrameis indica_, which is common in India, southern China, and Japan. Away off in southeastern Africa, upon the peaks and foot-hills which surround the huge volcanic masses of Kilima-Njaro, Kenia, and Ruwenzori, was discovered by the martyred Bishop Hannington a beautiful species of _Argynnis_, representing a genus nowhere else found upon the continent of Africa south of Mediterranean lands. Strange isolation this for a butterfly claiming kin to the fritillaries that sip the sweets from clover-blossoms in the Bernese Oberland, in the valleys of Thibet, and on the prairies of the United States.
_Butterfly._--Medium-sized butterflies, with eye-like spots upon the upper wings. Their neuration is very much like that of the butterflies belonging to the genus _Pyrameis_, to which they are closely allied. The eyes are naked, the fore feet are scantily clothed with hair, and the lower discocellular vein of the fore wing, when present, does not terminate on the arch of the third median nervule before its origin, as in the genus _Vanessa_, but immediately at the origin of the third median nervule.
[Illustration FIG. 98.--Neuration of the genus _Junonia_.]
_Egg._--Broader than high, the top flattened, marked by ten vertical ribs, very narrow, but not very high. Between the ribs are a few delicate cross-lines.
_Caterpillar._--The caterpillar is cylindrical, the segments being adorned with rows of branching spines and longitudinally striped.
_Chrysalis._--The chrysalis is arched on the dorsal surface and marked by two rows of dorsal tubercles, concave on the ventral side. The head is slightly bifid, with the vertices rounded.