My dear Sir,

I have just come down a few hours ago from our highlands where I visited a new German settlement São Bento situated on some small tributaries of the Rio Negro.¹ The white cleistogamic Viola is there extremely common & produces numerous normal & subterraneous flowers & fruits at the same time; in a few weeks there would have been plenty of seeds, but now almost all of them were as yet unripe so that I can send you but very few.²

In São Bento I have spent my time principally in catching butterflies of which I have made a rich harvest.³

On the Itajahy we have 3 sp. of Eueides, viz. E. Pavana, Isabella, & Aciphera; all of them are rare & E. Pavana extremely so. E. Pavana resembles closely to Acræa Thalia, E. Isabella to Mechanitis Lysimnia & Heliconius Eucrates, E. Aciphera to Colænis Julia.⁴ I formerly thought that the 3 rare sp. of Eueides mimicked the 3 common sp. of Acræa, Mechanitis & Colænis.

Afterwards, after finding that the several sp. of Eueides possess a very strong & repugnant odour I had become somewhat doubtful; & now at São Bento I found that Eueides Aciphera was extremely common, so common indeed that repeatedly I caught at once as many as 8 specimens in the net; whereas Colænis Julia was so rare that I have seen but 2 or 3 specimens at all.⁵

Thus judging by their relative frequency an observer on the Itajahy might consider Eueides Aciphera as a mimicker of C. Julia & an observer at São Bento C. Julia as a mimicker of E. Aciphera!

There was at São Bento a Papilio (allied to P. Grayi) the wings of the ♂ of which exhaled a strong & so delicious an odour that one might use it as indeed we did as a nosegay.⁶ I observed on this excursion, some other interesting cases of odoriferous butterflies. Thus I found that the two retractile pencils at the end of the abdomen of Lycorea ♂ exhude a strong odour repugnant to human noses but no doubt agreeable to the ♀s of that sp.⁷

&c &c | (Signed) | Fritz Müller.