62 THE CANADIAN' ENTOMOLOGIST 



colour reddish, the secondaries darker." I have seen the type of 

 oxygala Grt. (not oxygale) from Colorado, in the British Museum. 

 It is a very smoky thing, with secondaries wholly dark, in fact 

 darker than the types of minorata, or anything of this series that 

 I have elsewhere seen. Sir George Hampson's figure of it is poor 

 and misleading. The note I took the first time I saw the specimen 

 was, "Sugges.s a melanic minorata. Suspiciously like European 

 fidig'nosa (imptira).'' I noted on my next visit, however, that it 

 was not the sams a? fuliginosa. Having seen nothing else quite 

 like it, I must for the present let it stand as possibly a good species, 

 but feel quite satisfied that nearly all the references of Smith and 

 Dyar to oxygala really refer to minorata. I have only two speci- 

 mens from California, which agree with Smith's figure and descrip- 

 tion of the latter, except that they cannot be called reddish. They 

 certainly might easily be confused with fuliginosa, but are not as dark 

 as type oxygala, though more uniform smoky than the rest of my 

 series. 



In his "Revision of Leucania" Smith claims that the eastern 

 North American form previously known as pallens is distinct from 

 that European species, and describes it as luteopallens on somewhat 

 indefinite characters, emphasizing, however, a difi^erence in the 

 genitalia. He there includes the Alberta and B. C. races under 

 minorata, and says; "It stands between oxygala and the European 

 pallens, bsing really the American representative of the latter 

 species." Hampson refers luteopallens as a synonym of pallens, 

 placing it in a group in the tables, "Fore wing without fuscous 

 shade below median nervure," and holds minorata as distinct, 

 and having "fore wing wit'i fuscous shade below median nervure." 

 I could not see that this character held good in the British Museum 

 series, and it sterns to be a variable ^eature all over this continent. 

 The most justifiab'e separation in the group would seem to be 

 between the European pallens and our new world form. In most 

 European specimens the longitudinal strigation is similar, and 

 shading evenly distributed all over the primaries. In none of my 

 specimens i there an obviously darker shade below he median 

 vein, though such a variation is mentioned by Tutt in "British 

 Noctuae and their Varieties," Vol. I., p. 42, under the name suffusa. 

 In American specimens the region of the cell and of the submedian 



