Family Lycænidæ (the Hair-streaks, Coppers, and Blues)
Small butterflies. The males have the first pair of legs more or less aborted, and not adapted to walking. Many of the genera are brilliantly blue on the upper side of the wings, others are coppery red. In Africa there are numerous genera which mimic other butterflies in the form and color of their wings. The eggs are turban-shaped adorned with ridges, minute eminences, and networks of raised lines. Under the microscope some of them look like sea-urchins after the spines have fallen off. The caterpillars are slug-shaped, flat; and while most of them feed on vegetable matter a few feed on scale-insects and aphids, and some on the larvæ of ants. The latter are African and Oriental forms. The chrysalids are attached to the place where the caterpillar has pupated by a cincture or girdle.
The family is very large and is represented in all parts of the world, but there are probably more species in the American tropics than in any other quarter of the globe, unless it be in the Malaysian Archipelago and New Guinea, from which a host of species have been described in recent years.
A multitude of refinements in classification have been invented by recent authors and a lot of generic names have been proposed which in this book we shall in part ignore, as they are based upon such slight points that nobody but a man armed with a big microscope can make them out. They puzzle common people, and this book is for laymen and not for the supertechnical.