“Through the kindness of Mr. Edwards, I have had the opportunity of looking at your two recent papers on _Argynnides_ and on _Danais_, and have been much interested therein. Reading the latter article, I instantly had recalled to me some statements in regard to localization of the species at the Sandwich Islands by the sons of one or two American missionaries long resident there—gentlemen in every way to be depended on for common accuracy—by those statements I was led to an opposite conclusion from yours in regard to the means by which it was introduced; and since I have read your paper I have met with Dr. Gulick, for some time a missionary at Ascension Island, one of the Micronesian group, now in America for his health, from whom I have received some additional facts. They all concur in stating that this butterfly was formerly wanting at the Sandwich Islands, and spread over the Islands just as fast as did the milk-weed upon which they feed—the two keeping pace with one another. Dr. Gulick makes some more definite statements; he says that a gentleman in Hawaii sent him on Ascension Island (2,000 or 3,000 miles distant) a large box of plants under glass; that when they reached Ascension Island he found among them the milk-weed, which was set out with others; in five or six weeks they reached maturity, and then they discovered upon them the larvæ of _Danais_ which nearly destroyed them—the natives have never before seen them and the butterfly was altogether unknown, indeed, no such large and showy butterfly exists there. Subsequently and purposely, as an experiment, he took some seeds to the opposite side of the Island, twenty-five miles distant, and sowed them, and was absent some four or five months; when he returned the larvæ were there. A gentleman and the natives had been put upon the watch by him for the butterflies but none had been seen, and these larvæ changing produced the first they had any of them seen. “It seems to me that the appearance of the larvæ on the transported plant in its early growth leaves but little room to doubt that the eggs of the insect were transported also in the Wardian case.” Prof. Whitney read the following notice of the large mass of meteoric iron now in this city, on its way to the Smithsonian Institution: