"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".

Some beautifully illustrated butterfly books :