416 JOURNAL BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, 1891. 



experience were widely spread among its enemies, we sliould hardly 

 find a system of mimicry among its different species sowidely spread 

 as we do in the race of butterflies. 



MISCELLANEOUS NOTES. 



No. I.— THE NATURAL ENEMIES OF THE LOCUST. 

 Acridium peregrinum. 



At a meeting of the Asiatic Society of Bengal on Wednesday night, 3rd June, 

 1891, in the Society's house in Park Street, Mr. E. C. Cotes exhibited two 

 insect enemies of the Punjab locust Acridium peregrinum, also a magic lantern 

 slide, illustrative of what may, perhaps, be a contagious disease of the same 

 insect. Locusts are now prevalent to an alarming extent both in Northern 

 India and in Africa, so that the appearance of insect enemies and disease 

 among them is of some importance, it being known that the increase of locusts 

 to a great extent depends upon the presence or absence of parasites and disease. 



The first insect exhibited was a parasitic fly not unlike a small house fly, 

 which has been reared in large numbers from locust eggs sent to the Indian 

 Museum last March by the district officers of Peshawar and Eawalpindi. 

 Only a portion of these eggs produced locusts, the remainder yielding the 

 parasitic flies, which were no doubt nourished at the expense of the locust eggs. 

 These parasitic flies appeared in such numbers that they quite blackened the 

 sides of the rearing cages. They have been identified by the well-known 

 dipterologist, Monsieur J. M. F. Bigot, as a hitherto unknown species of the 

 genus Anthomyia, to which also belongs the species Anthomyia angustifrons, 

 which is an important parasite of the Eocky Mountain locust of America. 

 The precise life-history of the Indian species is not yet known, but it is 

 probably similar to that of its American relation, which, according to Dr. 

 liiley, the United States Entomologist, deposits its own minute eggs in the 

 ground close to where the locust has previously laid its eggs ; minute maggots 

 vapidly hatch out from the fly's eggs, and bore their way into the egg mass 

 of the locusts where they feed upon the contents of the locust's eggs, and 

 finally transform into little brown pupa3, from which the flies emerge ready to 

 lay more eggs, and thus repeat the cycle of then existence. 



The second bisect is one that had recently been sent from Peshawar by Mr. 

 Merk, the Deputy Commissioner, who wrote that it had appeared in vast num- 

 bers in his district where it was feeding voraciously upon the young wingless 

 locusts. This insect is known to entomologists as Calosoma orientate, and 

 I » 'longs to a group of carnivorous beetles which feed upon other insects 

 throughout the whole of their existence, and which are consequently likely to 

 prove of considerable use in destroying the locusts. 



