OF WASHINGTON. 27 
should be, will prove a fitting debut before the world. We have 
therefore every reason to be hopeful for our Society. 
Many of us are connected with Government work, and official 
life at best is more or less uncertain. Some of us may not tarry 
long in Washington, or may soon cease to become active mem- 
bers, but there is every promise that others will take the places 
of those of us who may leave, and in closing this first presidential 
address of the Entomological Society of Washington, I can but 
express my earnest hope that it will have a grand future, and help 
to promote all that is high and noble in the study of insect life, 
and to raise that study in the eyes of our fellow-men ; to render 
it, in other words, worthy of the highest talent and the deepest 
thousfht. 
APRIL 2, 1885. 
Six members present. Second Vice-President Marx in the 
chair. 
Mr. Mann exhibited a specimen of Rhagium lineatum cap- 
tured two days previously in the streets of Washington. Mi*. 
Schwarz remarked upon the early appearance of this Ceram- 
bycid on the walls of houses or at other places within cities. 
The species lives under pine -bark and hibernates as imago under 
such bark. Thus it is frequently brought into cities with pine 
wood, and as such wood is often stored in cellars and other shel- 
tered places, the beetle appears quite early in the season, or even 
in midwinter on warmer davs. 
Mr. Schwarz exhibited specimens of Rhopalopus sanguini- 
collis, and remarked that this is one of the few species of Coleop- 
tera peculiar to the mountainous regions of the Alleghanies. The 
scarcity of species peculiar to the higher montane region of that 
range, and the almost complete absence of such peculiar forms on 
the lower altitudes, is strongly contrasted with the abundance of 
montane and colline forms in Europe. As the probable reason of 
this difference, he gave the influence of the long-established culti- 
vation of the soil in Europe, by which the fauna and flora of the 
plains have been gradually brought in contrast with those of the 
less cultivated hills and, still more strongly, with the not culti- 
