34 PROCEEDINGS OF SOCIETIES. 



Mr. E. Percival Wright (Honorary Secretary of the Association) hav- 

 ing placed at my disposal his Memoranda of the past season's entomolo- 

 gical collecting, I extract from them some notices which also relate to 

 the neighbourhood of Arklow : — 



" In the middle of July many specimens of Nebria complanata were 

 obtained, lurking under the luxuriant fronds of Asplenium marinum, 

 at the foot of the rocks on the coast, about three miles south of the har- 

 bour. They were not easily distinguished by the eye from the white 

 sand and black stone which met here, and they seemed to seek conceal- 

 ment by thrusting their heads into the crevices of the rock, from which 

 it became necessary to dig them out with the point of a knife. The 

 admission of this species into the Irish Fauna previously rested on the 

 authority of a single specimen, found many years ago by Mr. Furlong, 

 in the same neighbourhood. On the verge of the sand-hills, which 

 bound the Wexford shore south of Arklow Head, Convolvulus soldanella 

 was growing in profusion. The blossoms, as they closed at sunset, im- 

 prisoned numbers of the pretty Basytes viridis. These insects, impatient 

 of the confinement, were observed to make their escape by gnawing a 

 small hole in the blossom, close to the calyx. The sands adjoining 

 Arklow Harbour on the north cease at a little stream, the same which 

 feeds the Tiknock corn-mills. This threads its way to the sea in a very 

 winding channel, among osier beds and tall thickets of Juncus acutus, 

 its bed at times nearly choked by masses of Alisma plantago, or by the 

 twining suckers of Rosa spinosissima and Rubus. Along the edge of the 

 stream Bembidium pallidipenne was common, and every now and then 

 Cicindela campestris took wing, quickly returning in a curve, like the 

 flight of the boomerang, nearly to the spot from which it had been 

 flushed at first. The woods of Shelton Abbey, which fringe the left 

 bank of the Avoca river, and climb the overhanging hills for miles above 

 the town of Arklow, afforded, as an addition to the Irish Fauna, Mal- 

 thinus biguttulus, beaten out of the oak." 



Mr. "Wright notices also the occurrence of Strangalia elongata abun- 

 dantly on Umbelliferse in the Devil's Glen. I now turn again to my 

 own entomological diary. 



An hour's delay one afternoon, awaiting a train at Delgany Station, 

 merely showed me that the shingly beach of Greystones had little to 

 invite the entomologist at that season. The clay cliffs, which rise up 

 directly from the beach north of the village, were baked almost as hard 

 as bricks. Only in one spot, where a trace of dribbling moisture remained, 

 I observed a few beetles, and among them a Bembidium, which seemed 

 to present most of the characters by which it has been sought to distin- 

 guish B. stomodes from B. rufipes, to which, as a variety, Mr. Jacquelin 

 Duval has reduced it. 



The rest of my gatherings were made nearer to Dublin, and, that I 

 may not take up too much time, I shall allude to but one or two of 

 them. A very marked variety of Cercyon littorale, which I do not re- 

 member to have seen anywhere before, occurred this season, both on the 

 Portmarnock shore (to myself), and on the North Bull sands, where it 



