Vol. XXvi] ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS. l6j 



Driven to the South by failure of health, I have taken up 

 my residence in Dallas, Texas. Here the nights of March 

 3ist and April ist, of 1913, were very dark, very warm and 

 sultry. In the evening there was a huge halo of insects gyrat- 

 ing around an arc light near my house. The ground beneath 

 was black with beetles, Calosoma scrutator in great numbers, 

 Carabns litgitbris. big black water beetles and two large 

 species of Dytiscidae, with Lachnosternas by the handful. 

 Now and then plump white moths whacked down on the 

 roadway, and proved to be the well-known moth of the salt 

 marsh caterpillar of Harris Estiginene acraca, Drury often 

 excessively abundant in the middle states. I secured a great 

 many specimens and made a beautiful plate of nature-prints 

 illustrating the wide variation of the species in size and the 

 number and proportions of the black dots. Applying my 

 thumb and forefinger of the left hand to the sides of the ab- 

 domen of a male, I moved them slowly and firmly down 

 toward the anal portion of the abdomen, when to my great 

 surprise and delight, the long-sought abdominal process shot 

 out of the last segmental line on the ventral side and waved 

 back and forth as of old. In one specimen the anal segment 

 lifted itself upward strongly and gave so fine a view of the 

 affair that I seized my pencil and got a fairly good drawing 

 of the structure, though I have no facility in that work and 

 certainly no felicity. I have reproduced this sketch as text 

 fig. i, accompanying this article. As the pressure increases 

 near the end of the body, the anal segment lifts itself 

 upward more or less and the last suture begins to widen. To 

 the right and left laterally, first appear in the widening aper- 

 ture, the tips of two brushes of hair, when suddenly, always 

 amusingly suddenly, there shoot out two flesh-colored, curved, 

 tapering, tubular processes, united at the base, and with a 

 brush of hair at the ends. The sides of the tubes are some- 

 what crenulated, as if segmented, although that does not seem 

 to be really the truth, and there is a rather scanty growth of 

 delicate, brownish hair along and around the tubes. Their 

 constant waving gives the impression that they are alive. I 

 verified this observation in the fall of 1913 and in April and 



