288 Mr. A. White on the Pupa-case of a Coleopterous Insect, 



impressed lines, the lateral and posterior margins slightly 

 dilated, the shoulder with a hollow between the umbo and 

 the side margin, evidently for the thorax-angle to work into, 

 when the insect retracts itself. In some specimens the general 

 surface is of a darkish brow^n, with the narrow dilated side 

 margin and tip, and the suture, yellowish ochre; the dark 

 brown is sometimes streaked with a dash of pale, and in some 

 the greater part of the dorsal surface of the elytra is pale, 

 with two broad streaks of brown, proceeding one from the 

 shoulder and one from the base near the suture. The elytra 

 are very closely punctured, and seem almost as if they were 

 shagreened. Thorax and elytra covered with short pile, 

 clearest and more silky on a line down the middle of each 

 elytron. 

 Tarsi with the fifth joint as long as the first and second joints 

 united ; all the joints longer than wide, and thickly clothed 

 beneath with coarse short hairs. 



There are smaller specimens with paler elytra, and a blackish 

 line near the lateral margin, interrupted before the tip, which 

 has a black spot. I believe it to be the same. 



I hope this insect may prove a nondescript ; although, in this 

 active age, when books have increased as describers have in- 

 creased, it is very difficult, unless you rigidly restrict yourself to 

 a very limited subject, to master even the nomenclature of it. 

 I cannot find any description of the insect ; it is named after 

 my excellent friend M. Guerin-Meneville, whose kindness to me, 

 a very young naturalist, when I visited Paris in 1841, I cannot 

 forget. I have named it after him because it is allied to a family 

 (the Cebrionidce) the habits of one of which he discovered when 

 a young man, at Toulon. I remember his giving me an ac- 

 count of his discovery. It was in 1812 that he found the Cebrio 

 gigas, a well-known insect, fluttering over the grass in the even- 

 ing, much as chafers do in this country. A close observation 

 enabled him to find one of them, coupled with an insect without 

 wings, which had her ovipositor protruded from a small hole in 

 the ground, from 2 to 2^ lines in diameter. This insect, now- 

 well known to be the female of Cebrio, had been described by 

 Rossi as Tenebrio dubius. Olivier, from its having only ten 

 joints to the antennae, named it Cebrio brevicornis. Latreille 

 had described it as the type of a genus, which he named 

 Hammonia, and which, in one of the volumes of the ' Nouveau 

 Dictionnaire d'Hist. Nat.,^ published in the memorable year 

 1817, he regarded as an established genus. The late Professor 

 Victor Audouin communicated to the French Entomological 

 Society his observations on the species which he observed during 



