39° The Ohio Naturalist. [Vol. IX, No. 1, 



All this led me to make an examination of the A'arious 

 Halobatine forms in my collection to find if any other had a 

 similar peculiarity, which gave the following result: 



Of 37 winged Trepobatopsis denticornis, Champ., collected by 

 Prof. James S. Hine in Guatemala, 11 being males and 26 

 females, all have truncate tegmina with ragged edges, shoeing 

 that the membrane has been broken off. 



The thirteen Trepobates pictus collected by me locally in the 

 last two summers gave nine individuals with artificially shortened 

 wings, five males and four females, including the one that broke 

 off^ its wings in the aquarium and one or tv, o others ^\ith the 

 wings only partly broken off. The very few winged Rheu- 

 matobates rileyi I possess, eight specimens in all, gave seven vith 

 shortened wings, the males being four and the females three. 

 In Tebnatometra whitei Bergr., all six t\-pes (1 male and 5 females) 

 as Dr. Bergroth points out, have the membrane broken off, not 

 near, however, but at the basal margin. In all the exam.ples 

 before me, the break is at the caudad margin of the corium, 

 leaving intact the corial venation. 



In Rheiimatobates , the suture separating the membrane and 

 corium appears as a whitish impressed line, or rather, groove, 

 which is practically straight and crosses the tegmina from edge 

 to edge, just caudad of the termination of the corial venation. 

 The figure (I) is from a winged female Rh. tenuipes Mein. from 

 Glen Echo, Md., which I owe to the kindness of Mr. O. Heide- 

 mann. It is, of course, largely diagrammatic, although drawn 

 under the microscope by the aid of a camera lucida. It serves 

 to shov/ the general trend a-b, of the suture along which the 

 break takes place. This indented line is present in the two 

 species known to me in the macropterous form. 



In Trepobates pictus there is a similar suture (Fig. 2, a-b), 

 but it differs from that in Rheuniatobates in that it does not go all 

 the way across the hemelytron, but stops some distance from 

 the submarginal vein, in a sort of node (not shown in figure). It 

 also has a raised appearance, something in the nature of a 

 true vein. 



The hemelytra break off' along this suture in both Trepobates 

 and Rheuniatobates. This is in all likelihood the case with the 

 monotypic genera Trepobatopsis (Fig. 4) Champion and Tel- 

 matometra (Fig 3) Bergroth, but the lack of entire-winged 

 specimens does not permit confirmation bv actual observation. 



Naturally, there must be some reason for this self -mutilation, 

 because, unless it be a survival of some acquired habit once 

 necessary in its economy, no insect is given to purposeless acts. 

 Two seemingly reasonable ex])lanations suggest themselves, one 

 of which is closely associated v^ith the breeding habits of the 

 Hemipteron. In the macropterous form of Rhcumatobates rileyi, 



