353 



NOTES ON THE FAMILY BRAGHYSGELIDyE, WITH 

 SOME ACCOUNT OF THEIR PARASITES, AND 

 DESCRIPTIONS OF NEW SPECIES. 



Part I. 



By Walter W. Froggatt, Technological Museum, Sydney. 



(Plates vi.-vn.) 



These curious woody-gall-forming coccids, one of the most well- 

 defined and interesting groups of the Coccididce, were until lately 

 said to be peculiar to Australia ; but in a recent paper Mr. W. M. 

 Maskell* places in this family the genus Carteria, several species 

 of which have been described from America, and he forms several 

 new genera for the reception of allied forms found chiefly on the 

 Casuarinas and Melaleucas of this country. The members of the 

 genus Brachyscelis are distinctly Australian, confining their attacks 

 to the Eucalypts, and at one time I believed that each species of 

 coccid had a partiality for a particular species of Eucalyptus, but 

 observations extending over several years have proved that, though 

 some of the rarer species may keep to one tree, most of them 

 thrive on various Eucalypts ; Brachyscelis ovicola, Schrader, one 

 of our commonest species, has a very wide range over the southern 

 parts of Australia, and is found on at least a dozen very different 

 sorts of Eucalypts. 



Mr. H. L. Schrader, a resident of Sydney, was the first to 

 record observations on this group in two interesting communica- 

 tions to the Entomological Society of New South Wales in 1862.t 



* Trans, and Proc. of the New Zealand Institute, 1891, Vol. xxiv. 

 t Trans. Ent. Soc. N.S.W. 1862, Vol. i. pp. 1 and 6. 



