50 



many others, from a friend in Yorkshire, who informs me he took 

 it in May, and that it is there very scarce, but in these more southern 

 parts has never yet been discovered by anybody ; therefore is esteemed 

 as a great curiosity." 



Then in 1767 came the twelfth edition of Linnaeus's " Systema 

 Naturae," and in it we find Bowhyx viendica with exactly the same 

 description as in the " Fauna Suecica," ed. II., already referred to, 

 thus showing that he was still conversant with the male only. In 

 this connection a paper by Thomas Marsham in the " Transactions 

 of the Linnean Society" (vol. i., p. 67, pi. i., 1791) is interesting. 

 The title of the paper is " Observations on the Phalaena Bombyx 

 Lubricipeda of Linneus and some other Moths allied to it," and with 

 regard to mend tea he says, " Linneus himself appears to have been 

 unacquainted with the female mendica : the specimen of the male 

 in his cabinet being a bad one, with the spots obliterated, he 

 describes it, 'cinerea tota, femoribus luteis.' This however is not the 

 case, for the male is spotted like the female. There is indeed a bad 

 specimen of the female of this moth in his cabinet; but it is placed 

 indiscriminatel}'' with lubricipeda and erniinea." By the courtesy of 

 Dr. Daydon Jackson I have recently had the advantage of inspecting 

 Linnaeus' specimens. The male, as Marsham says, is a bad one, 

 both as to condition and setting, and Linnaeus may well be forgiven 

 for describing it as "cinerea tota," but it has his own label attached 

 and the species is unmistakable. The female also is a poor specimen 

 and has been removed from among the lubricipeda and placed along- 

 side the male niendica, but bears no label. 



Thus matters stood for nearly ten years when Schiffermiiller and 

 Denis published the "Systematisches Verzeichniss der Schmet- 

 terlinge," a work in which larval characters appear to be largely 

 used as a basis of classification, and in which the group in which 

 mendica is included is described as " Larvae Celeripedes" (quick- 

 footed). Specific characters are not, as a rule, mentioned, but in a 

 footnote to uiendica we are told that Linnaeus knew only the 

 cinereous male, the female is usually white (page 54). Thus it 

 is evident that at this time (1776) both sexes were known and in 

 1783, Knoch (" Beitriige zur Insectengeschichte," iii., tab. 2, 

 figs 5-12) figured both sexes of the imago together with the larva in 

 various stages and pupa, and gives its full life-history. 



One would have thought that the matter was thus definitely 

 settled, yet in 1785 we find Fourcroy (" Entomologia Parisiensis," 

 II., p. 270) under the name of Phalaena punctata (La Nervure picot^e) 

 describing a moth that can be nothing but the male mendica, but 

 makes no mention of the female, that se.K probably being still 

 unknown to him. 



But from about this period authors generally recognised the fact 

 that the cinereous male with black spots and the sub-diaphanous 

 white female also with black spots were the sexes of the one species. 



