THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 381 



posterior whitish bands. Second segment with a small dorso- 

 lateral rufo-fulvous spot reaching posterior margin. Venter black, 

 the whitish bands more distinct. Feet black Wings dark fuli- 

 ginous, fading at apex, hinder margin and root. First posterior cell 

 widely open. 



A paratype, slightly damaged, is a little larger and lacks the 

 spots on second segment. 



Taken in May, at West Palm Beach, Florida, by Dr. H. E. 

 Wright, after whom the species is named. 



JEAN-HENRI FABRE. 

 It is hard to believe as I write that Fabre is dead, for the great 

 age to which he lived and the extraordinary character of the man 

 had, as it were, dulled one's senses to the inexorable facts of life. 

 The photograph before me of "that inimitable observer," as Darwin 

 called him more than half a century ago, showing that keen old 

 face wrinkled with years of the most intense and penetrating 

 observation still intent on the movements of an insect, had instilled 

 into one an idea of permanence. But on October 11th, at Orange, 

 he finished a life of ninety-two years of hard and strenuous toil. 



Born of humble parentage at Saint Leons, a little village in 

 the Haute Rouergue, on December 22nd, 1823, he was destined to 

 a life of poverty, through which he struggled with an indomitable 

 perseverance, which was the outstanding characteristic of his entire 

 life and the main cause of the imperishable fame that will be his. 

 His early years were a perpetual struggle for education. Undeterred 

 by disappointment, he laboured on as a teacher, now as a professor 

 of mathematics and physics at Ajaccio in Corsica, where an acquain- 

 tance with that brilliant naturalist Moquin-Tandon was responsible 

 for his determination to forswear mathematics for the study of 

 living things, and later at Avignon, always careless of degrees and 

 dignities. The chance discovery in 1854 of a volume of that 

 famous entomologist, Leon Dufour, on the habits of a wasp, 

 Cerceris, directed his steps into that path of patient entomological 

 study from which, during the succeeding sixty years" of incessant 



