396 ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY 



wallow and often crawl on hands and knees. When we dis 

 turbed the pendant masses of chattering bats, they disentangled 

 themselves and flew away into deeper recesses of the cave, leav 

 ing behind them such swarms of the winged parasites that we 

 were almost suffocated by them, and as they sought a shelter in 

 our hair, beards, and even our eyebrows, the nuisance quickly be 

 came intolerable, so that we had always to beat a hasty retreat 

 into some less infested passageway until quiet was again restored. 

 There was also about the bat chambers, apparently living in or 

 about the dung of the bats, a number of other flies, one of which 

 was apparently rare and equal in size to a blue-bottle fly. It is, 

 however, a hairy Muscid which looks unfamiliar to me. More 

 numerous by far is a minute black gnat. 



On the walls in the first large chamber, 75 feet below the mouth 

 of the cave, we found a few specimens of a very large mite, quite 

 like a small tick and evidently an interesting cave species. It is 

 white with pale evanescent markings on the dorsum, and is quite 

 flat and tick-like in form. We found it hiding cleverly in small 

 but deep pits in the white marly walls of the cave, remote from 

 the bat roosts. There were of course a number of spiders. One 

 is a large crepuscular species quite like those found in small Ken 

 tucky caves. There are, however, some small colorless species 

 belonging evidently to true cave genera, and resembling Authrobia. 

 Scolopenders were conspicuous by their absence except at the 

 mouth of the cave, and there were no crickets found. A small 

 pale-red cockroach does not seem to be common, and is appar 

 ently not remarkable. A minute Hemipteron was not uncommon 

 on the surface of the water in pools deep within the cavern My 

 specimens all look like immature and very young skippers, but 

 certainly do not belong to any common forms above ground. 

 They are dark colored, and evidently closely allied to the small 

 Hemiptera found on the surface of springs and pools in shaded 

 forests. 



We were so much interested in this cave that we gave two days 

 to its examination. A log farm house near by sheltered us at 

 night, and we had pot luck with the hospitable cracker whose 

 farm adjoined the cavernous region. Webber and Swingle made 

 a notable collection of moulds and cave fungi, and I salted down 

 a good series of articulates. The cave we have named the Gum 

 Tree cavern, from a large sweet gum tree which grows on th-j verge 

 of the sinkhole at the entrance. It is situated in the southwestern 

 corner of Citrus County, and about 8 miles from Floral City, on 

 the S. S. O. & G. Railroad. The rocks here are all phosphatic, 

 and the entire region is dotted over with phosphatic mines in ac 

 tive operation. 



