In Amboyna and other towns of the Moluccas, the magnificent Deiphobus and Severus, and occasionally even the azure-winged Ulysses, frequent similar situations, fluttering about the orange-trees and flower-beds, or sometimes even straying into the narrow bazaars or covered markets of the city. In Java the golden-dusted Arjuna may often be seen at damp places on the roadside in the mountain districts, in company with Sarpedon, Bathycles, and Agamemnon, and less frequently the beautiful swallow-tailed Antiphates. In the more luxuriant parts of these islands one can hardly take a morning’s walk in the neighbourhood of a town or village without seeing three or four species of Papilio, and often twice that number. No less than 130 species of the family are now known to inhabit the Archipelago, and of these ninety-six were collected by myself. Thirty species are found in Borneo, being the largest number in any one island, twenty-three species having been obtained by myself in the vicinity of Sarawak; Java has twenty-eight species; Celebes twenty-four, and the Peninsula of Malacca, twenty-six species. Further east the numbers decrease; Batchian producing seventeen, and New Guinea only fifteen, though this number is certainly too small, owing to our present imperfect knowledge of that great island.
Definition of the word Species.
In estimating these numbers I have had the usual difficulty to encounter, of determining what to consider species and what varieties. The Malayan region, consisting of a large number of islands of generally great antiquity, possesses, compared to its actual area, a great number of distinct forms, often indeed distinguished by very slight characters, but in most cases so constant in large series of specimens, and so easily separable from each other, that I know not on what principle we can refuse to give them the name and rank of species. One of the best and most orthodox definitions is that of Pritchard, the great ethnologist, who says, that “*separate origin and distinctness of race, evinced by a constant transmission