Book Description

Excerpt from The Butterflies of Switzerland and the Alps of Central Europe The difficulty I experienced, when beginning to collect butterflies in Switzerland, in finding out what to look for, and when and where to look, and the discovery that many others were in the same situation, first opened my eyes to the necessity for a book with some such scope as the present. No work dealing with the Swiss butterflies as a whole had appeared since Frey's "Lepidopteren der Schweiz" in 1880, though Lang's "Butterflies of Europe" was published in 1884, and 1885 saw the production of the "European Butterflies of Kane, who has become the "guide, philosopher and friend" of a large and ever-increasing number of British lepidopterists in the Alps and elsewhere. Moreover, not only had new species been discovered since that time, but one of the books was in German, another decidedly expensive and not very portable, and the third, I was informed on trying to obtain a copy, sold out; and in neither of them was the subject of variation, so intensely interesting even to the "mere collector," more than lightly touched on. It was not, however, until much later that I even contemplated the possibility of trying to supply the deficiency, an idea which was first suggested to me after the publication of some of my papers in the Entomologist's Record, when I found, to my own great surprise, that my advice was asked, and my opinion consulted, by entire strangers, even including, during the last two years, some of the best known lepidopterists of Switzerland. This circumstance, together with the fact that no one else seemed willing to throw himself into the breach, must be my excuse for undertaking the task; and, if it be a case of "where angels fear to tread," I can only plead that at least I have not "rushed in." Often the inclusion, or even the suppression, of a single line has entailed the close examination of many specimens, and a most unexpected amount of correspondence. The original idea was to include Swiss butterflies only, but Switzerland is so entirely a political rather than a geographical expression, that it seemed necessary either to enlarge or diminish the scope of the work, and, after much consideration, the whole of the Alps of Central Europe have been included; i.e., the Alpes-Maritimes, the Hantes and Basses Alpes, and Savoie in France: the Alps of N. Italy; the Tyrol; the Styrian, Carinthian and Julian Alps, and such small portions of the S. of Upper and Lower Austria as are alpine. At the same time the original idea has not been lost sight of; the whole of Switzerland is included whether alpine or not (which has involved the inclusion of the French Jura), and those species and varieties which have never been taken in Switzerland are marked with an asterisk (*), for the convenience of those collectors (no insignificant number) who confine their attentions exclusively to the butterflies of that country. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.