114 THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST 



(d^ and 9) of M. gibbidus as soon as I returned from camp. A 

 few days after, I received a letter of acknowledgement, with a 

 P. S. which declared that the writer had for years greatly desired 

 to possess in his cabinet a specimen of a small beetle found, but 

 rarely, on fungus-covered logs in our northern forests; it was 

 called Gonotropis gihhosiis. I had never heard this name before, 

 nor did I know to what family the beetle belonged; so, naturally, 

 my first thought was that I could never have come across the 

 insect or I should have known the name, and further, that among 

 the 10,000 or 11.000 beetles known in North America, it was most 

 improbable I should ever stumble upon the particular one my 

 correspondent desired. 



When, moreover, I returned from the backwoods and drew 

 out my Henshaw to find Gonotropis a weevil, I felt still more cer- 

 tain it was a case of looking for a needle in a haystack; nor was it 

 much better to learn that it belonged to the small family of Anthri- 

 bids, for of these I had only 2 or 3 representatives at most. How- 

 ever, I turned up the two works I possess on the weevils, LeConte • 

 and Horn's monograph and the recent book of Blatchley and Leng; 

 here, avoiding the small print of detailed description, I looked 

 to see the range and record of captures; from the older work I 

 found that the insect was sui generis and (worse and worse!) that 

 both generic and specific descriptions were founded on a single 

 specim.en from Colorado; the recent work did indeed record it 

 over a very wide range on both sides of the border, but it was evi- 

 dently extremely rare, for the senior author, Leng, was the very 

 man who had written to me about it. 



Having gone so far, however, I glanced over the detailed 

 specific description: "convex, black; white face, proboscis amd 

 scutellum; broad, saddle-shaped patch of white near the base of 

 the elytra; two humps on the 3rd interval;" and suddenly there 

 rose out of the page before me the picture of a stony market- 

 garden, two mccking men with hoes, a snake-fence, a dead hem- 

 lock rail, and that queer little pair of weevils squatting on the bark, 

 like hobgoblins in a fairy tale. I jumped for- the shelf on which 

 my July captures lay cabined, and from the middle of a box 

 most ludicrously labeled "Bachelors," drew out the tiny pair of 



