266 ANNUAL RECORD OF SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY. 



stituted according to a peculiar type capable of modification 

 in either direction by gradual changes, without loss of utility. 

 The complete metamorphosis of insects belonging to the Lep- 

 idoptera, Coleoptera, and Diptera will then be the result of 

 adaptive changes brought about through a long series of 

 generations. 



CRY OF DEATH'S-HEAD MOTH. 



Mr. H. N. Moseley publishes in Nature for June 20 the re- 

 sult of an elaborate series of experiments for the purpose of 

 ascertaining the cause of the singular cry produced by the 

 death's-head moth {Acherontia atrojios), about which many 

 treatises have been written, referring it to a great variety of 

 different organs. Mr. Moseley appears to have satisfactorily 

 determined that it proceeds from the proboscis of the in- 

 sect. 



NEW BUTTERFLIES. 



In an article in The Academy , Mr. J. O. Westwood, an emi- 

 nent entomologist, notices sundry works that have been pub- 

 lished in Europe upon the Lepidoptera, and remarks upon the 

 immense number of new forms of these animals that still con- 

 tinue to be brought to light, notwithstanding the amount of 

 attention they have received for many years past. He states 

 that Mr. Buckley, who has just returned from a twelve months' 

 visit to the eastern slope of the northern Andes, has brought 

 back with him from one hundred and fifty to two hundred 

 new species ; and that in an immense collection of fifty thou- 

 sand specimens of Costa Rica butterflies lately carried to Lon- 

 don by Dr. Van Patten, a gentleman well known to American 

 naturalists, there are not less than fifty species not previously 

 described. 



He takes occasion to read entomologists a lecture for their 

 fondness for upturning the established nomenclature of spe- 

 cies by bringing to light names which, although in reality 

 prior to such as have been generally accepted, have yet been 

 published in obscure works, and the introduction of which 

 will tend very greatly to unsettle the ideas as to nomencla- 

 ture that have been entertained by the great body of natural- 

 ists. It is not impossible, however, that in this he is mistaken ; 

 and if what is generally called the inflexible rule of priority 



