66 . Tramactions, — Zoology. 



difficulty experienced in obtaining works of reference, they 

 will be retained for a future occasion, and your attention 

 directed to a very large tick, two specimens of which were 

 found with their claws so firmly imbedded in the neck of 

 the bird as to render it impossible to remove them without 

 the loss of some of their legs. 



The genus to which this belongs is a very interesting one, 

 for Mr. Murray tells us that their habits are at first herbivorous, 

 that from the vegetation they find their way to the creatures on 

 which they fix, and that when mature they avail themselves 

 of every opportunity of fixing upon vertebrate animals, whose 

 blood they suck instead of sap. It is very remarkable that 

 these creatures should be at one time phytophagous and at 

 another carnivorous. And it would seem that the usual 

 special adaptation of structure to kind of food is absent; but 

 Mr. Murray says that the anomaly is only apparent, and 

 goes on to say that "carnivorous mammals are provided with 

 dift'erent apparatus for obtaining their food from that of 

 vegetable feeders ; not on account of the different chemical 

 constituents of their food, but on account of the different 

 form in which it is presented to them for consumption and 

 assimilation. If, for example, the food of both were pre- 

 sented to them in a liquid state, in the one case blood, and 

 in the other juice of plants, we may be sure that the carnivorous 

 canines in one case, and the vegetarian molars in the other, 

 would be alike dispensed with, and both would be furnished 

 with a sucking-up or pumping apparatus, which might be 

 identical, if no speciality in the mode in which the liquid 

 presented itself called for a difference. There might be a 

 difference in the structure of their viscera, adapted to the 

 character of the liquid food, but there is no reason why the 

 external and oral structure should not be the same in both. 

 This is what we find in all suctorial insects, bugs, gnats, Acari, 

 etc. All are provided with a sucking apparatus constructed 

 on a similar plan, which some use upon animals and others 

 upon plants." I read recently that some insects — for instance, 

 the London house-bug — feed indiscriminately upon the juice 

 of plants and the blood of animals. The impossibility of the 

 immense numbers of mosquitos that we meet with in the 

 forests ever obtaining food if restricted to the blood of mammals 

 has probably struck most of you. Is it not likely that they 

 also are capable of living on a vegetarian diet, when no nice 

 juicy specimen of humanity is forthcoming. 



The insect to be noticed — viz., Ixodes vutskellii (which I 

 have ventured to name after Mr. Maskell, who described the 

 only other species yet recorded from New Zealand) — is pro- 

 bably one of the largest of the genus, being, when alive, just 

 under half an inch in length, excluding the rostrum; it is 



