OF WASHINGTON. 245 



the acceptance of the Gardener's Chronicle as a medium for 

 scientific description, as to the identity of the two forms, and 

 as to the sufficiency of Newport's description. Westwood and 

 Newport themselves had a polemical discussion of the matter 

 in the Annals of Natural History, Vols. Ill and IV, and their 

 relative descriptions were published in this periodical as well 

 as in the Gardener's Chronicle, Proceedings of the Linnean 

 Society of London, and Transactions of the Entomological 

 Society of London. In the general opinion of naturalists, the 

 Gardener's Chronicle was at that time a valid medium. Fred'k 

 Smith has vouched for the identity of the forms, and although 

 Newport's description of the female is indefinite, that of the 

 male is unmistakable. The few words published by Westwood 

 In 1847, however accurately we now know the insect to which 

 he referred, would never be considered by a systematic zoolo 

 gist of to-day as competent to fix a generic name. They were 

 in fact, not so intended. 



Mr. Ashmead's paper being mainly structural, a resume of 

 the habits of this curious parasite will be appropriate at this 

 time. The first mention occurs in Westwood' s Introduction 

 to the Modern Classification of Insects, Vol. II, p. 160 (1840), 

 in which he gives an account of the transmission of specimens 

 to him by Audouin, who had found them in the provisioned 

 nests of Odynerus, Anthophora, and Osmia. The second men 

 tion is that of Westwood in the Proceedings of the Entomolog 

 ical Society of London for 1847, p. xviii. Then followed 

 Newport's and Westwood' s descriptions previously referred to, 

 the most important, biologically, of these contributions being 

 the first one by Newport in the Proceedings of the Linnean 

 Society. In this paper he states that his personal observations 

 dated back to August, 1831, and we cannot doubt that after 

 having known these insects so long, his desire not to be antici 

 pated in publication by Westwood, whose possession of facts 

 he first became aware of at the meeting of the Entomological 

 Society of July 5th, 1847, induced him to rush hastily into 

 print in the Gardener's Chronicle, and placed him in the very 

 unenviable light to which Mr. Ashmead has called such strong 

 attention, 43 years later. Newport found the larvae filling the 

 cells of Anthophora, of the larvae of which scarcely a vestige 

 was left. In the paper read before the Linnean Society Feb 

 ruary 3d, 1852, he details finding the larvae of the parasite 

 attached to the larva of the bee in November. They were 

 minute in size, and were not observed to grow during the win 

 ter. He thus considered Anthophorabia a primary parasite. 



Frederick Smith, in the Transactions of the Entomological 

 Society of London for 1853 (new series, Vol. II, p. 248) details 

 a series of observations by himself upon the same insect. He 



