THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 411 



violet was almost the only capture. 1 had been told that a somewhat 

 rare Longicorn was to be met with on the blossom of the trillium, but my 

 informant could not tell me its name, nor did patient search in trilliums 

 yield me any specimen of this family. About the 20th of May, however, 

 blossomed the earjy elder, and though I wasted a great deal of time over 

 elder clumps growing far away from woodlands, I did at last, by good 

 luck, direct my steps to some growing on the edge of a wood about four 

 miles north of the school. Here I found a new species of Scarab, 

 leaden-gray in colour, though disguised for the nonce in a light yellow 

 coat of pollen, with which it was thickly dusted over ; it had long crooked 

 hind legs that looked too clumsy to be of much use to their owner, and 

 were, indeed, trailed along after it when it crawled. It was the male of 

 Hoplia tri/asciaia, and I found it abundant for two or three weeks on the 

 early elder, the choke-cherry and the hawthorn ; at first only the males 

 were to be found, but about a week later the females became common ; 

 these at first I took for a distinct species, as they are very different in 

 colour, yellowish-white, with three irregular bands of brown across the 

 back ; on the hawthorn, however, where the female was in preponderance, 

 I more than once found a pair. The same mistake appears to have made 

 its way into print, and the two sexes were at one time assigned to distinct 

 species, the male figuring as Hoplia tristis, and the female as Hoplia 

 trifasciata. I found also on this clump of elder a few specimens of one 

 of our earliest Lepturas, L. ruficollis ; and, by way of a new illustration to 

 the old adage that "it never rains but it pours," three specimens of what 

 at first I took to be an ant, till on looking closer I saw the straight line 

 down the back formed by the suture of the wing-covers and the gracefully 

 curving antennae that mark the Longicorn beetle. It was quite new to me, 

 and my fellow-collector, though several seasons older than I, had nothing 

 like it in his collection. There was nothing specially remarkable about 

 its colour, which was blackish or dark gray, relieved by some transverse 

 pencilled lines of white, and it was only y§ of an inch in length, but there 

 was an elegance of form and outline that made it long a favourite in my 

 little collection. This enthusiasm in a grown man doubtless seems absurd 

 to the uninitiated, and I must admit, somewhat ruefully, that I found my- 

 self an object of pity rather than envy when I "talked beetles" to a brother 

 of mine who has misspent the last 20 years of his life tiger-hunting in 

 Madras and bagging lions in Rhodesia, in fact, generally making ducks 

 and drakes of all his golden opportunities to collect rare Longicorns from 

 tropical blossoms. 



