DUBLIN UNIVERSITY ZOOLOGICAL AND BOTANICAL ASSOCIATION. 33 



lation half amphibious; and donkey-carts, which had conveyed the 

 inland dwellers to the arms of Neptune, were drawn up, about the 

 time of high water, along every sheltered cove and sandy bight of the 

 shore, relieved of their living freight now seeking coolness and comfort 

 amid the yielding waves. The undulating expanse of bleached sands, 

 which stretches away north and south of the frowning bluff of Arklow 

 Head, lay sweltering under the tremulous eddy of the heated air, in 

 dazzling uniformity, as wearisome to the eye as the too impressible soil 

 was to the feet, giving way under every tread. Numbers of the large - 

 headed black ant, Formica fuliginosa, were abroad. This species usually 

 makes its nest in rotten trunks of oak-trees : here they were far from 

 any site of that sort, but seemed quite busy and happy in the torrid 

 heat. Off the herbage in the hollows, consisting of dwarf willows and 

 other less shrubby plants, I swept a pretty — and, as far as I can make 

 out, undescribed — Gloliceps, which I had taken once before in this 

 county, at about 1800 feet of altitude, on Lugnaquilla. My walk over 

 the Head, from which a steep, rocky path leads down to the nooks, 

 fringed with Asplenium marinum, where Mr. Wright had discovered 

 JSfebria eomplanata abundant a month earlier in the season, did not pro- 

 cure for me a single specimen of this. In some hollows of the seaward 

 face of the cliffs, moistened by oozings of fresh water, soaking through 

 from the heights above, Machilis maritima was collected in troops, sip- 

 ping the clear lymph from the brim. Orphnephila testacea was there 

 also, and Hydrophorus virens gleaming like a beryl, as it rested, lightly 

 poised, on its slender legs. This species seems to occur, though but 

 sparingly, throughout the whole county of Wicklow wherever the per- 

 pendicular faces of rock, so common in the district, are shaded from the 

 direct sunbeam, and kept moist by the tricklings from above. Argyra 

 argentata also maybe observed in the like haunts, gleaming like a snow- 

 flake, as well as Anthomyia riparia and others of this family. More 

 common still, and this particularly in the darkest niches, was Clinocera 

 bipunctata, along with which C. unicolor also occurred, but much more 

 rarely. Against a sheer wall of rock, up the valley of the Aughrim 

 river, about a mile above the Wooden Bridge, under such circumstances, 

 and half immersed in the dripping bath, numerous slender larvae, of 

 various growth, were weltering, which glided rapidly away, when dis- 

 turbed, in serpentine tracks across the slippery precipice. I had no 

 convenient means for rearing any of these, and so can merely conjecture 

 that they belonged to Clinocerse, without being perfectly assured they 

 may not have been the progeny of some of the jSTemocera. 



The low salt marsh which stretches away north of Arklow Harbour, 

 marked on the maps as the " Ferry Bank," afforded me a new species of 

 Scatella (or Caenia, since that other genus of Desvoidy's might better 

 be reunited to this), Limnophora, n. sp., Culex cardans, &c. In a rushy 

 hollow of the tongue of sand intercepted between the sea and the 

 shallow creek formed by the back-water of the river, I procured several 

 specimens of Thinophilus versutus, in both sexes, of which the male had 

 been previously known to me only by Bohemann's description. 



VOL. IV. f 



