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Wednesday, December and, 1914.

Mr. G. T. BETHUNE-BAKER. F.L.S., P.Z.S., President, j i i

the Chair.

Bleclion of Horiorary Fellow.

Prof. LAarEsRE of Brussels was elected to the Honorary Fellowship vacant by the resignation (and subsequent death) of Dr. August Weisniann.

Prof. POULTON read a letter showing the circumstances under which Dr. Weismann had been persuaded to sign the declaration of the Gerinan Professors.

Sppoint?nent of Audztora.

The President announced that he had nominated the following Fellows to act as -4uditors :--

On the Couricil : Messrs. S. EDWARDS, G. MEADE-WALDO, and H. ROWLAXD-BROWS.

Not on t?w Council : lIeshr5. YL. W. IJAJYU. H. .I. TVRSER, and c. 0. ~ ' A ~ ~ E I < I I O ~ J S ~ ~ ~ .

Esli ibit ioris.

COLORATION OF DESEICT H1.nrEKoPT~:Ka.-Tlle Rev. P. 1). MORICE exhibited a few Hyincnoptera of various group from Egypt, Algeria, etc., showing the silvery pubescence and pale colours frequently characteristic of Desert insects. Also i~

lantern slide showiiig t h e seventh ventral seginent in Prosopix cort,nk.ul~;is 0".

DARK - 4 n ~ r n A r 1 0 ~ OF ARGTNKIS ~ o i ~ ~ . - - M r . H. J. TURNER exhibited a striking aberrat,ioii of an r l r g y ~ i s with syai- metrically coalescent dark niarkings on the upper side and the silver spots on the under side hind-wing forniiiig a triple bwal blotch and marginal streaks ; it was taken t,his pear on August 2, in the deserted garden of Prince Henry of Prussia, at St. B1orit.z in the Engadine. The spec,ies being uncertaiii Mr. Turner showed wit,h it specilnens of the three Swiss species of Aryynnis.

The Rev. G. WHEELER ohserved t.h;tt in the case of a j

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the species were readily distinguishable by the position of the androconia 011 the nervures, and by this test the insect was shown to be A . niobe.

PREY OF AN AFRICAN AsILID.-&~. S. A. NEAVE exhibited a large series of insect,s, 1326 in all, forming t.he prey of a common Asilid, Promachus .fnscialus, including Lepidoptera 91, CIoleoptera 279, Hymenoptera 334, Orthopt,era 55, Rhyn- chota and Homoptera 132, Neuroptera 4, and Diptera 361, of which no less than 101 were other, or in a few cases, the same, species of Asilid. H: also exhibited an example of a Mantis, Polyspilota pustulatu, St&l, preying upoii the large Asilid, Hyperechia consirnilis, Wood.

Mr. Neave received the thanks of the Societ?- foi , this interesting and laboriously collected exhibit.

Iiibited a specimen of Drepanepteryn phalaerioides, Linii. (Order Neuropters), taken about the end of July 1914, by Mr. E. A. C. Stmowell, B.A., a t Bexhill. It. was found sitting very quietly on t.he glass of a street lanip between 10 and 11.30 pm., on the outskirts of Beshill about three-quarters of a mile from the sea. It so closely resembles t'he Hook-tip fhepa,n,irc jalcataria that its captor took i t for that species. For a Neuropteron it is fairly large; but still this was only itbout t,lic t,mentieth specimen that had been captured i i i

.Britain. Apparently i t seldom flies in the daytime, and may on that account escape notice. Judging by the datte of capture of various specimens its period of flight is a long one.

exhibited a little machine of his own invention consisting of ii mechanical stage specially adapted for the microscopical examination of pinned insects, and so contrived as to admit of the insect on its pin being turned completely round on both a vertical and horizontal axis, without, its departing from centre of t.he field or the focal plane.

A SCARCE BRITISH NEUROPTERON.-MI.. W. J . ],lJ(!AS f!X-

1-1 MOVABLE MICROSCOPIC STAGE.-&. H. ELTRIXGHAY

A N AUSTRALIAN LYCAENID LARVA RESENBLING THE FLOWER

OF THE '' WATTLE," ON WHICH IT FEEDS.----Pl'Of. POULTON

vxhibited the flowers of an Acacia, probably A . ZKlileyarw, IT. v. Muell., together with a female Lycaenid, N a c a d d ~ ~ hiocellata, F e l ~ l . ~ and t.he pupa-case from which it hail emerged.

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On August 3 last. Prof. Poulton was collecting. Thrips with Xr. H. M. Giles, a t Mundaring Weir; in the Darling Range, near Perth, W.A. While shaking the flowers of a Wattle over a sheet of cardboard, there fell a Lycaenid larva which bore the most remarkable resemblance to the yellow fluff;. balls of the inflorescence. The likeness, mainly due t.o the long yellow hairs wit,h which the larva was clothed, was increased by its attitude, the body being rather strongly curved. Mr. G. A. Waterhouse, to whom he had described the caterpillar, had told him that no such Lycaenid larva was known in Australia. The Acacia was a small tree, one of a series evidently artificially planted bv the roadside. The name, given by Mr. Giles, had been confirmed by Dr. Ott,o Stapf, F.R.S., so far as it was possible to determine the species from the dried flowers alone. A . baikyunu was onlv known wild in a limited area of New South Wales, but t,he Mundaring plant was not wild. The larva pupated without any supply of food beyond the quickly drying blossoms enclosed wit,h it, and the imago emerged August 30. on t,he P. and 0. st,ea,mer

DR. G. D. 11. CARPENTER'S ~ U S E K V A I ' I O N S ox DOKYLUS NIGRICANS, ILLIG., I N DAXBA ASD R ~ G A L L A ISLANDS.-- -Prof. YOULTON read the following record of observations from the same letter as that quoted in the succeeding note on A . e.qialen.. Dr. Carpenter's further conclusions as to the habits of t,he Driver ants of these islands in the N.W. of the Victoria Nyanza had been published in .Proc. Knt. Soc., Lond., 1913, vxxviii.

" I have got some iiotcs for you on L)oryZ.zu, which I think may be of int.erest to the Ent.omologica1 Society. I send them because I have recently been interested in reading Lamborn's and Farquharson's notes [Proc. Ent. Sor., Lond., 1913, cxxiii-cxxviii ; 1914, v-viii]. Of course I constantly meet them out hunting, and sometimes get them all over me ! As a general rule, in the forest, one can hear them before seeing them. They run up branches and tall stems, and then when t.hey get to the top either fall or drop off on to the leaves below, and the pattering noise thus made (like that of tiny raindrops) is very distinctive, and often gives one warning. They cer-

Nalwa,' off Albany, W.A.

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tainly do eat. vertebrates. 1 once heard pit.iful squeaks in long grass and found they were attacking a baby rodent,: needless to say I freed the infant ! One night on Bugalla an enormous army raided my house-luckily they did not attack me in my tent, although one small column came through it-- and devoured a nest,ful of young swallows. Bones and all were carried away, and when I got up in the morning I found t,he nest full of a writhing mass of t,hese brutes ! 1 know no more horrid sight in nature than a huge caterpillar rolling over and over in agony while it is cut up alive. Tlie Drivers will even manage to cut up slugs, in spite of the slime poured out which usually overwhelms some of them. However, a new species of snail like a huge Vitrinu, which was not un- common on Damba, used to escape. It shrank as far as possible within the shell, and produced a mass of bubbles of mucus which so completely surrounded it, shell and all, by a barrier about half an inch thick, that the ants could not get a t any part of its body. It was curious to see them biting into the foam and of course finding nothing : and the bubbles were so tenacious that they could not be burst. When an army of Dorylus had been t.hrough the jungle hunting, one used to see numbers of these snails which had tried to escape by crawling up tall stems, and then, having come to the top, had surrounded themselves by foam. Indeed, these were the only occasions on which I ever found this mollusc, which probably lives low down among decaying leaves, etc.

* ' I very often used to see Dor?ylus hunting on Danibii fly beach, while I was doing observational fly work there. Be- tween the edge of the forest and the water was a pebbly beach about ten yards wide, and when the ants were hunting, this was thronged with lurking denizens of the dark damp places among dea.d leaves, etc., which had to flee for their lives from the forest. Cockroaches ran madly about in all directions-. if only they kept their heads they might have escaped-but, they ran about' so wildly that they often tumbled head over heels and thus fell all the easier victims ! I twice saw, hover- ing over these cockroaches, and occasionally suddenly pouncing down. (apparently for the purpose of ovipositing) several of a small long-bodied insect-it might have been B Dipteron or

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an Ichneumon, but the hovering and darting flight suggested rather a Syrphid. It was so extraordinarily active that 1 failed to catch it. At the time I was puzzled by this, for 1 couldn't see the object of laying an egg in an insect which was destined to be cut up into little bits a t once ! I was therefore extraordinarily pleased, when recently re-reading Bates on the Amazons, to note that he describes a precisely analogous thing in the case of a fly of genus Stylogaster (Conopidae) and the foraging ants Ecitoii. He says ' the armies of all Ecitons are accompanied by small swarms of a kind of two-winged fly . . . these swarms hover with rapidly vibrating wings a t a height of a foot or less from the soil over which the Ecitons are moving, and occasionally one of the flies darts with seat , quickness towards the ground. I found they were not, occupied in transfixing ants, although they have a long needle-shaped proboscis, which suggests that conclusion, but most probably in depositing their eggs in the soft bodies of insects which the ants were driving away from their hiding- places. These eggs would hatch after the ants had placed their booty in their hive as food for their young.'

'' Isn't it extraordinarily interesting that two such different, species of ants, but of precisely similar habits, should be attacked by parasites iii the same way in South America and Uganda? If one thinks of it there is very little chance for an enemy to attack these ants, which are so active and ferocious and of wandering habits. So either this method, or the method of stealing the pupae which Lamborn described recently, had been evolved as a means of checking such a formidable species. But what extraordinarily fine adjust- ment to the habits of the ant! The method of gaining an entrance into the inaccessible nest reminds one rather of old stories such as the wooden home of Troy, etc. !

'' I once saw a Hemipterous insect escape being eaten by Ilorylus. It mas one of the flat, triangular, vegetable-feeding type. The ants were all over the bush and frequently seized an antenna or a leg of the bug, but always let go again. Thk is interesting, because they will eat such distasteful things m Acraeine larvae and pupae.

" In almoat. the first column of Dorylcts which I saw on the

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march (not hunting but hurrying along a narrow pathway) 1 found amongst the ants a Coprid beetle [probably an aberrant Ohathophagus, or belonging to an allied genus], which I was informed by the Entomological Research Committee was quite unlike anything they had in the British Museum. It was- so far as I remember-about half an inch long, black, highly polished and flattened, with limbs closely fitting. It rail along in the midst of the column, with ants all round i t and often hurrying over it. Sometimes it came near the edge of the column (which was about six ants wide), and had it been a11

involuntary inclusion in the army could easily have escaped. but always went back again amongst the ants. It must rertainl y have been myrmecophilous-a bold insect indeed to attach itself to such ferocious friends ! This column wa< ii particularly large one. When I noticed it first, on the evening of July 18, 1910, i t was crossing a pathway, and the ants ran between walls formed oi others standing as it werr on tiptoe with jaws widely agape. These walls are literall>- made of a meshwork of ants with entangled legs-and sometimes they roof over trhe line of march in the same way.

'' At sunset, then, on July 18, the column of ants was pouring across the road, coming out of a hole on one side and going down a hole the other side. My notes, made a t the time, said-' I think every ant had a pupa, but not one carricd a larva.' It was in this column that I saw the beetle before mentioned. On the morning of July 19, the column was still streaming across in the same direction, and flowed con- tinuously until 3 p.ni., when the living walls had broken up. and the column was formed of a few ants only without pupae : by sunset they had ell crossed over. But for a t least-twenty- four hours (for I have no doubt whatever they had been marching all night,) they had been passing in a continuous stream ! This must have been the occasion of a change froni one temporary camp to another.

In the first place he uses the end of his long and heavy abdomen as an extra leg with which to push himself along (after the manner of a Carabid larva). In the second place he is att,racted by light and comes buzzing and banging round, and

* 'The 6 DoryZus is a most objectionable fellow.

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crawling everywhere in the objectionable inanner I have mentioned, until one is forced to bottle him--one cannot get rid of him otherwise. As many times as he is hurled a,way with fright,ful curses back he comes-until one is sick of him ! Before rain is the time,--and I have had as inany as twenty come one after another ! "

DR. G. D. H. CARPENTER'S OBSERVATION OF THE EPIGABW:

USE OF ITS ANAL BRUSHES BY THE MALE AMAURIS PSYTTALEA.

PLoTZ.-PrOf. POULTON read the following note extracted from a letter written to him, July 23, 1914, from Konie Island in the N.W. of the Victoria Nyanza, by Dr. G. D. H. Carpenter :-

" On July 21 at, t'he edge of the forest, here on Koine Island. iibout 3 pin., I saw the courtship of Amauris psyttalea, Plirtz. 1 noticed two flying about., obviously a male pursuing a female. Presently the latter settled on an erect dead flower-spike of an aromatic lnbiate, about two feet above the ground. Shc sat with head upwards, and body perpendicular, wings out- spread a t right angles. The d hovered flutteriiigly about !our inches over her head, rising and falling a little, but 011

the whole a t about the same level. His abdomen hung down M little and every now and then, a t intervals of a few seconds. the two flaps [the $ claspers, especially large in Danaines] at the end of the body were widely separated (so as to stand out a t right angles to t,he longitudinal axis of the body) and the brush was quic,kly protruded and as quickly drawn i l l

again. I was surprised to see what a large structure it was- - being quite whit,e and visible a t a distance of several yards. In fact, I first noticed it, a t that distance, and went closer t,o see what was going on. The 9 sat quite still, except for an occasional very slight movement of the wings. I watched for a minute or so, and it, was impossible t,o doubt that the 2 was endeavouring t.0 excit,e the 9. Just as I thought I would catch them as records, the Q suddenly flew away and the 2 followed. I have, however, no doubt of the species.

'' The very sudden protrusion of the brush might easily cause the peculiar fine hairs of stellate section, described by Eltringham, to break int,o sections which would float. like dust in tlhe air."

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Prof. POULTOX said i t would be remembered that Nr. W. A. Lamborn had observed the stroking of the hind-wing brand9 by the anal brusheR of the male Amauris ninvius, L. (Proe. Ent. SOC., Lond., 1911, xlvi, xlvii), and A. egiaka, Cram. (1912, xxxiv, xxxv; 1913, lxxxiii, lxxxiv). Dr. Carpenter had now carried these observations a shge further, by showing the manner in which the brushes, presumably charged with scent from the brands, were employed in courtship. The relative positions of the two insects suggested the possibility that the antennae of the female were the sense organs st(imu1ated by the odoriferous powder. It was most satisfactory that these valuable observations in the field should throw so much light upon, and receive so much light from, Dr. Eltringham’s admirable investigations in t,he laboratory.

Paper.

The following paper was read :-- ‘‘ Further Observations on the Structure of the Scent,-

organs in certain Brush-bearing Male Butterflies.” by B. ELTRINGRAM, M.A., D.Sc., F.E.S.

The paper was profusely illustrated with slides stown in t hc Epidiamope .