A Bath White, not a white bath
If you try doing a Google search for the Bath White butterfly, you get a lot of white baths. Don’t try it. This is what I’m actually looking for:
I’ve seen the Bath White before in Italy:
It’s only mentioned in the Appendix to my 1939 copy of Edmund Sandars’ A Butterfly Book for the Pocket as he says “For many reasons I have preferred to exclude them from the body of the book and to make this appendix for them. They are not truly British Butterflies. Some once were: others, so far as we know, never have been, but, being residents on the Continent have, rarely, strayed here. My test is: does the appearance of a specimen produce a letter to the papers? If it does – appendix”
Apparently it was, “Recorded in some numbers in 1872.”
The reason I can see it? I’m in Italy. I won’t be writing to the newspapers about it.
I love his illustrations. Here’s my photograph:
Here it is from over 100 years earlier from John Curtis’s breathtaking book ‘British Entomology: Being Illustrations and Descriptions of the Genera of Insects Found in Great Britain and Ireland: Containing Coloured Figures from Nature of the Most Rare and Beautiful Species, and in Many Instances of the Plants Upon which They are Found, Volume 5’, with an illustration from 1824:
Edmund Sandars’ book from 1939 cost me 30 pence. I don’t think I could afford a copy of John Curtis’s book, if it ever came up at auction.
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