430 PKOOEEDINGS OF THE SOCIETY. 



Dr. Shilling-ton Scales read a paper by Mr. Percy Aubin, F.R.M.S. 

 on " The Buzzing of Diptera," omitting the descriptive part, which 

 could hardly be followed in the absence of the detailed drawings and 

 letterings (then in the hands of the lithographers). 



Mr. Hopkinson thought the paper offered opportunities for discus- 

 sion among entomologists. Although not an entomologist himself, he 

 was familiar with Swinton's Insect Variety (1880), some 130 pages 

 of which were devoted to discussing how sounds are produced in insects, 

 including the following (page 211) : — " Chabrier informs us that in the 

 bluebottle the hinder thoracic spiracles (rneta thoracic) are closed by (two) 

 little scaly lips, and if these be carefully removed with a fine needle the 

 buzz of the insect is scarcely audible during flight. Burrneister advanced 

 further. Having removed all movable external parts from the common 

 drone fly of our flower beds which still continued its peculiar notes, he 

 also became convinced that the sound arose at these same metathoracic 

 spiracles, which he proceeded to dissect. He then discovered their 

 edges to be furnished internally with a fringe of parallel membranous 

 plates, horizontally overlapping and decreasing in size towards either 

 extremity. In this insect there are fifteen such on either edge." 



Mr. Hopkinson then read from the English translation of Bur- 

 meister's Manual of Entomology the passage alluded to by Swinton, 

 which gave a full account of these experiments on Eristalis tenax. As 

 this translation appeared in the year 1836, the original would in all 

 probability have been published in about 1834, so that similar experi- 

 ments on the same fly were made some eighty years ago, with the same 

 results as those carried out by Mr. Aubin and described in his paper, 

 and it was somewhat strange that no reference had been made by the 

 author to Burmeister's work. 



The President said it might seem an extraordinary thing that two 

 workers, living at such different periods, should independently have 

 come to almost identical results, but in regard to plagiarism he always 

 recalled what an old teacher of his, Professor P. G. Tail, once said to 

 his class : " Gentlemen, our plagiarists are our predecessors." It must 

 be remembered that subconscious cerebration was constantly occurring, 

 and many examples were current in which a man had at some time or 

 another gained an impression from something he had read, or may be 

 from the very work upon which he was engaged, which led him along 

 the same lines of thought as that pursued by his predecessors, and this 

 without doubt perfectly honestly and sincerely, with the result that he 

 brought forward what he thought was new work, only to find that it 

 had all been done before. Whilst we could not fail to be very much struck 

 by the great similarity which often occurred in the results of experiments 

 carried out by two different workers, it must be remembered that men 

 of like minds given the same material would naturally perform the same 

 experiments. They would select the same organisms and work on the 

 same lines ; and thus be led to obtain the same results. He was very 

 loth indeed to believe that any man would willingly bring forward work 

 he was not convinced was absolutely original. In the case of the paper 

 they had just heard, it would be very interesting to find out from the 

 author himself whether there were any possibility of his ever having 



