186 NOTES AND EXHIBITS. 



Mr. Froggatt showed specimens of the beetles referred to in 

 his paper, and of adult females of a destructive Floridan coccid, 

 Icerya rosce, Riley and Howard, from the vicinity of Sydney, 

 respecting which he communicated the following Note : — 



" Early last December, when collecting on the other side of 

 Cook's River, opposite Canterbury, I found some Hakea acicularis, 

 the branches of which were covered with a large oval dull reddish- 

 brown scale, with its edges fringed with white waxy matter. A 

 number of these specimens were forwarded to Mr. W. M. Maskell, 

 of N. Zealand, who has identified them as Icerya rosce, described 

 by Messrs. Riley and Howard in Insect Life, Vol. iii. p. 93, 1891, 

 where the life history is illustrated with drawings of the female 

 in all stages of development. It was received by them from 

 Key West, Florida, U.S., where its attacks were very destructive 

 to roses, causing the limbs to wither and the leaves to fall off. 

 This is the first time, as far as I am aware, that this Icerya has 

 been recorded from any locality except Florida, and its discovery 

 here therefore is very interesting." 



Mr. North exhibited a set of three eggs of the New Holland 

 Honey-eater, Meliornis novce-hollandioi, taken on the 21st inst. at 

 Canterbury, and he pointed out that this species in the neigh- 

 bourhood of Sydney and probably elsewhere has two distinct 

 breeding seasons in the year. During the past week he had 

 found at Canterbury and Botany seventeen new nests of this 

 Honey-eater, eleven of them containing eggs or young ones a 

 few days old, the remainder of the nests being in different 

 stages of construction ; and in addition he saw fledgelings in the 

 bush that had just left the nest. This was the fourth year in 

 succession this species had been observed breeding in autumn 

 during the bright warm days of April and early May. In the 

 normal breeding season of birds in New South Wales, this species 

 commences to breed at the beginning of July and continues as 

 late as the end of December ; nests, however, are more frequently 

 found during August, September, and October. There is a distinct 

 break in the breeding seasons during the very hot weather between 



