THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 413 



This finding of a new species acts as a great incentive to the collector; 

 not merely through the stimulus and encouragement of filling gaps in his 

 cabinet, but through the interest and education of comparing closely-allied 

 species and genera, and gradually following out the relationship of distinct 

 tribes as the series of intermediate forms grows more and more continuous; 

 thus retracing, as if were, the steps of natural evolution. It was, I know, a 

 great encouragement to me to find the wide gap between, say, the 

 Cyllenes and the Lepturas being gradually filled in and the various 

 stages of the transition emerging, so to say, from the unknown. I believe 

 it was the consequent redoubled efforts made by my fellow collector and 

 myself the next season, more than mere luck, that brought us an interesting 

 discovery in the middle of June. On a certain Sunday morning I 

 captured on spiked maple a specimen of an ant-like beetle, obviously 

 belonging to the Anaglypti group, but neither Cyrtophorus verrucosus 

 nor Euderces picipes, and in the afternoon of the same day on hawthorn my 

 friend captured a specimen of an ant-like beetle neither Cyrtophorus verru- 

 cosus nor Euderces picipes. Neither of us noticed his discovery till we came 

 to turn out the contents of our killing-bottles on returning home. Stranger 

 still, the new species we had captured, when we came to compare notes, 

 proved different from one another. By a close examination of my friend's 

 capture, I found he had at last got a genuine specimen of Microclytus 

 gazellula. My capture has not yet been identified, but it may be referred 

 almost certainly to the genus Cyrtophorus. 



I have been led into something of a digression here, and for purposes 

 of this paper I may remind you that we are in the month of May, and 

 searching for beetle guests on the blossoms of the early elder. Through 

 the middle of the wood where I made these first discoveries flows a small 

 stream that has eaten out for itself quite a deep ravine through the lime- 

 stone clay and marl. About ioo yards up this glen grows a large shrub 

 of early elder that opens about the end of May ; on its blossoms we got 

 several more of the Leptura ruficollis, but nothing new that season. In 

 1907, however, while my fellow collector was examining the blossoms, he 

 spied a new Longicorn, of which he captured three specimens, and a day 

 or two later, from the same shrub I managed to get two. Though there 

 were several other elder bushes in the wood, we have found this beetle 

 on none of them, only on this one tree, and it has yielded us from three 

 to five specimens every season since. As far as our experience goes, the 

 beetle is active from the end of May till nearly the end of June. In 

 1907, from another locality I took two specimens on dogwood blossom ; 



