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"During
my first walk into the forest I had seen sitting on a leaf out of
reach, an immense butterfly of a dark colour, marked with white
and yellow. I could not capture it, as it flew away high up in the
forest, but I at once saw that it was a female of a new species of
Ornithoptera, the pride of the eastern tropics. I was very eager
to get it, and to find the male, which in this genus is always of
extreme beauty.
During the 2 succeeding months I only saw it once
again, and shortly afterwards I saw the male flying high in the
air at the mining village. I had begun to despair of ever getting
a specimen, as it seemed so rare and wild, till one day about the
beginning of January, I found a beautiful shrub with large leafy
bracts and yellow flowers, a species of Mussaenda, and saw one of
these noble creatures hovering over it, but it was too quick for
me and flew away. The next day I went again to the same shrub, and
succeeded in catching a female, and the day after, a fine male. I
found it to be as I had expected, a perfectly new and most
magnificent species, and one of the most gorgeously coloured
butterflies in the world. Fine specimens of the male are more than
seven inches across the wings, which are velvety black and fiery
orange, the latter colour replacing the
green of the allied species. The beauty and brilliance of this
insect are indescribable, and none but a naturalist can understand
the intense excitement that I experienced when I at
length captured it. On taking it out of
my net and opening the glorious wings, my heart began to beat
violently, and I felt much more like fainting than I have done
when in apprehension of immediate death. I had a headache the rest
of the day, so great was the excitement produced by what to most
people will seem an inadequate cause". |
