ir)2 Cincinnati Societij of Natural History. 



The species of Hyponomeuta are white, adorued with small black spots 

 to set off their white ground color to greater advantage, like the patch " 

 of an Elizabethan dame, or a modern belle, and contrast strongly with 

 the dark surfaces of palings, and the bark of trees, where they a,re usu- 

 ally found resting. Neither can it be claimed for many of the gaily 

 colored Tineina that they have any such means of protection as a dis- 

 agreeable smell or taste, since man}'^ of them fall victims to predacious 

 Diptera, saltatorical spiders, and larvje of Hemerobious and Chrysoioa^ 

 which frequent the same localities and prey upon them. 



But I have gone much more fully into this subject than I intended. 

 It is not my purpose in what I have written to attempt to establish 

 by arguments from analog}'' what is properl}?^ matter ofoccular demon- 

 stration. But the facts that I have alluded to, and the conclusions 

 drawn from them, seem to me to have a bearing on the question, and 

 as manj' of them have not heretofore been published in a connected 

 form, I have taken advantage of Prof Rile3^'s paper, not for purposes 

 of controversy, but as a text for these remarks on the habits of these 

 little moths. 



There are, however, one or two other points in Prof, Rile3''s paper, 

 apart from the identification of these species, to which I wish to allude. 



Dr. Baird has somewhere (I write now from memory) advanced the 

 theory or hypothesis, that the birds of the West are larger, with 

 greater development of peripheral parts, and greater depth or inten- 

 sity of color, than the equivalent species in the Eastern States; and Dr. 

 Packard, in Hayden's Report, for 1873, had suggested that the same 

 rule applied to insects; and in a paper in the JSiUletiu, before referred 

 to, I had come to a different conclusion as to the Tineina. Comment- 

 ing on this, Mr. Riley writes: "Mr. Chambers' premise being at fault, 

 there is of course no force in what he says against the general rule laid 

 down by Baird and Packard." What premise, may I ask, is at fault? 

 If I had based m}' conclusion on the single instance of P. yiiccasella; 

 and //'all the specimens examined by me, and referred by me to that 

 species, had belonged to Hyponomeuta. then mj^ premise would most cer- 

 tainly have been at fault. But that was not my premise, nor anything 

 like it. On the contrary, many of m\' specimens had the unmistakable 

 palpi of the female yuccasella, and one of those seen by Mr. Rile.y is 

 admitted by him to belong to that species. Mi-. Riley writes as if ni}- 

 conclusion, adverse to the hypothesis above referred to, was based upon 

 the solitary case of P. yuccasella, and then says my premise is false, 

 while he utterly overlooks the fact that in the very samepaper in which 

 I discuss this hypothesis {liidletin, v. 3, p. 147), I passed under review 

 all the known species (some seventy odd in number) of Tineina of 

 Colorado; and while admitting that two or three species (notably Bias- 



