Brown 7 Eyes

A wet and windy morning with only a few Ringlets on the wing. Petiver went overly descriptive when he tried naming this species. In 1699 he called it the "Brown Eyed Butterfly with Yellow Circles", then in 1717 suggested both "Brown 7 Eyes" and "Brown 8 Eyes". Moses Harris gave us "Ringlet" in 1766 which has stuck despite later names such as "Brown-eyed butterfly" (1769), "Brown Argus" (1795), "Wood Ringlet" (1853) and, as recently as 1961 Ian Heslop's "New label list of British Macrolepidoptera" proposed "Common Ringlet".