370 PROCEEDINGS: BOSTON SOCIETY NATURAL HISTORY. 
indigo {Baptisia tinctoria) and scattered clumps of huckleberry 
bushes (Gaylussacia). Search should be made for it on Martha's 
Vineyard and southern Cape Cod. In New Jersey it is found on 
sandy barrens and it is widely distributed in the central and 
plains States, always as an inhabitant of wild, unimproved land, 
and usually on dry soil. It is a relatively sluggish species and is 
said by Blatchley in Indiana to frequent "the surface of the 
ground rather than the stems of the tall prairie grasses among 
which it makes its home." Allard states that in Georgia it 
prefers luxuriant growths of weeds and grasses in moist bottom 
lands. 
The presence of this flightless species on the island of Nan- 
tucket adds another item to the many data supporting the theory 
that in earlier geologic times a great sandy plain bordered the 
Atlantic seaboard from Virginia to Newfoundland, providing 
opportunity for characteristic plants and animals to spread far to 
the northeast. The present widely isolated colonies of these are 
to be considered as remnants of a once continuously distributed 
flora and fauna now surviving only in particularly favorable 
localities. 
THE SHIELD-BACKED GRASSHOPPERS— ATLANTICUS. 
The Shield-backed Grasshoppers {Atlanticus spp.) are large, 
brown, wingless, ground-dwelling insects with long hind legs and 
slender antennae. They live for the most part among the 
fallen dead leaves, which they closely resemble in color, usually in 
dry upland woods of either evergreen or deciduous trees. They 
are not restricted to such situations, however, but have been 
captured while singing in bushes, in brush-grown pastures, a foot 
or two from the ground, and in tussocks of grass in swampy 
fields; occasionally they climb the trunks of trees, attracted by 
the sweetened baits put out by collectors to lure moths. Since 
they are chiefly nocturnal in habit, the flashlight and lantern are 
useful in watching and capturing them ; and ground-set molasses- 
traps suitable for Roaches will often entice them to destruction. 
In the South, one species at least is preyed upon by a large 
fossorial wasp (Chlorion ichnewnoneum) , whose burrows Davis 
records finding stored with numbers of these insects as food for 
their young (Journ. N. Y. Ent. Soc, Dec, 1911). Their stridula- 
