ZOOLOGICAL NOTES "9 



Dunnet Head precipices. How much farther south the birds may 

 yet occupy, I will not at present venture to say. Mr. Kearton and 

 Mr. W. L. Dunbar saw a pair of these birds hovering about Holborn 

 Head on ist June 1905, but whether they were nesting it was 

 impossible to say. The ledges of the cliffs at Holborn Head dip 

 towards the sea, and consequently afford less holding-ground for rock 

 birds and their eggs than the cliffs of Dunnet. J. A. HARVIE- 

 BROWN. 



The Wood- Wasp (Sirex gigas). The late summer of 1906 was 

 remarkable in the extreme south-west of Scotland for an unusual 

 number of that fine insect the so-called Wood-Wasp (Sirex gigas). 

 Needless to say, it is not a wasp, nor in any way related to wasps,, 

 its affinities being with the saw-flies and ichneumon flies. Foresters 

 need apprehend no mischief to growing trees from the presence of 

 these flies, as they deposit their eggs only in dying or felled trees ; 

 but carpenters have reason to complain of the tunnels made in 

 timber by the larvas, and considerable alarm is said to have been 

 caused sometimes by the emergence of numbers of hornet-like 

 creatures from the foreign timber in newly built houses. 



I saw a female Wood-wasp in August last, quite dead, having 

 driven her ovipositor into a larch pole in a paling and failed to 

 withdraw it. HERBERT MAXWELL. 



Lepidoptera of East Ross-shire : a Correction. By an un- 

 fortunate slip, Miss Dorothy Jackson's notes on the Lepidoptera of 

 East Ross-shire were attributed to the western section of the county 

 in the January number of "The Annals " (p. 54). Only one species 

 (Eudidia mi) was taken in West Ross-shire. 



Phoxiehilidium femoratum (Rathke) from the Firth of Forth. - 



Having submitted to Prof. Carpenter a pair of Pycnogonids, found 

 under a stone between tide-marks at North Berwick, in January 

 1896, he informs me that they belong to the species Phoxiehilidium 

 femoratum (Rathke), which, so far as I know, has not previously 

 been recorded from the Firth of Forth, though known from other 

 parts of the east coast of Scotland. AVILLIAM EVANS, Edinburgh. 



Prsemaehilis hiberniea, Carpenter, in Scotland. A most interest- 

 ing discovery has recently been made by my friend Prof. G. H. 

 Carpenter of Dublin, namely that the Thysanuran which in Ireland 

 has been regarded as Machilis polypoda (L.) is not that insect, but 

 a new species which he has just described under the name of 

 Prcemachilis hiberniea (see Irish Naturalist, 1907, pp. 54-5 6 )- O n 

 hearing of this discovery I resubmitted to Prof. Carpenter some 

 specimens (from Arthur's Seat, February 1896, and Bridge of Allan, 

 February 1898) recorded by us as Machilis polypoda in our joint 

 paper on the Collembola and Thysanura of the Edinburgh district, 



