C. Kunin (2003) "Madame Blavatsky had some very strange ideas about Lemurians that might have appealed to Nabokov. There may be a link to those lemans in Ada, but I don't know."
...
"Dr Krolik received from Andalusia and kindly gave me five young larvae of the newly described very local Carmen Tortoiseshell. They are delightful creatures, of a beautiful jade nuance with silvery spikes, and they breed only on a semi-extinct species of high-mountain willow (which dear Crawly also obtained for me)."