The series Butterflies of the World by Bernard D'Abrera, now enters its fourth faunal region with this first volume on the Oriental Region.
The Oriental Region is essentially an Island Region and continues, because of this fact, to be a source of great attraction to naturalists and zoogeographers from every part of the globe. The vast number of islands and archipelagoes provides an equally vast number of geographical races and forms for study, and in a sense these races and forms swell the known number of taxa to a size comparable with that of the fabulous Neotropical Region. It is here in the Oriental Region, that the largest and most opulent papilionids and the most extravagantly coloured pierids fly, and where the danaids reach the very peak of their development not only in numbers of species and races, but also in size and sheer beauty of form.
It is from the Oriental Region, that the greatest wealth of butterfly history has been chronicled and such collecting localities as The Khasi-Jainta Hills, the Nilghiris, Kandy, Corbet's Gap, Eraser's Hill, Langkawi, Tenasserim (perhaps the most famous of all), Nias, Gunong Gede, Lake Toba and the waterfall at Maros and Bonthain peak (in Sulawesi) have become legendary.