40 MR. CURTIS ON A NEW SPECIES OF SAW-FLY. 
the circumstance, I sent you some specimens, which I believe were dead before you got 
them, owing to your absence from home. Last year they again appeared, and I then sent 
you those from which you have so fortunately been able to obtain the perfect fly. 
“I have not, as you know, been much at this place of late years, and therefore it is 
possible they may have existed here before 1846; but I am sure when I was more at 
Putney, from 1840 to the end of 1843, there were none of them to be found, although the 
plant was then in the same place as at present. They have never killed the plant, although 
they have often eaten up all its leaves and tender fibres. It is now the 8th of June, and 
none have as yet shown themselves this spring.” kt à | 
By a subsequent letter, however, I find that on the 14th Lord Goderich noticed them, 
but in smaller numbers than in previous years. — 
The caterpillar has 22 legs, viz. 6 pectoral, 14 abdominal, and 2 small anal feet: it is 
of a pale greyish green, shagreened, with very narrow transverse folds, and there is a slight 
tint of ochre about the fourth segment and towards the tail, with an indistinct greyish line 
down the back: the head and six horny pectoral legs are deep black and shining : there is 
à double row of minute black dots down the back, formed of short spiny tubercles, with 
à row of similar dots down each side, as well as along the spiracles, which are black, and 
the folds of the thighs are freckled with minuter spines (2, 2): the trunk or fore-part looks 
dilated when viewed from above; these larvæ were nearly $ of an inch long on the 28th 
of June, when many of them had cast their last skins, which were left sticking to the 
leaves (fig. 3), and they disappeared in succession, burying themselves from 2 to 4 inches 
deep in the earth, where they formed small oval cocoons like a coating of glue, but often 
perforated in places (fig. 4). 
In the present year I had the satisfaction of breeding a male fly on the 30th of April; 
on the 3rd of May another hatched, and also two females, and these were succeeded by 
several more of the latter sex which emerged from their tombs. They were as black as 
` ink, and appear to be allied to Selandria Juliginosa of Schrank; but the male antenne» 
drum (a), of two bifid mandibles (b, b), of two elongated maville (c, c), towards the extre- 
mities of which are attached long, slender, pubescent palpi, composed of six joints, the 
basal one short, the remainder tolerably equal in length (figs. d, d) : the mentum is small, 
producing a nearly orbicular, tripartite, membranous labium (fig. f ); from the superior 
