THE SOUTH-EASTERN PYRENEES IN EARLY JUNE. 57 



excellent photographs of these slides, the most perfect that we have 

 yet seen of these structures, and he commands me to discourse 

 on these Hj'droecias before the Entomological Society of London. 

 Why I should be dragged in I do not know — I suppose to satisfy 

 his conscience that he has, at least, done all that a human can be 

 expected to do, to get the species he knows to exist, defined for 

 the collector. I ask him what it matters whether a lepidopterist, 

 who will not take the trouble to examine (through ignorance or 

 laziness) the genitalia of his specimens, can distinguish liicens and 

 cnnaneufn's or not. I have myself tried to find obvious iraaginal 

 characters of distinction, and, like him, I have failed. However, he is 

 adamant. I am to point oat the facts as they stand to the entomo- 

 logical public, then, I suppose, I may put these Hydroecias in the 

 pigeon-hole of memory again, get on with "blues" and "plumes," 

 and look back on this upheaval as a bad dream. 



I have looked through what I wrote in 1891 in the British Xocfiiae 

 and their Varieties, pp. 58-61, and later in the Knt. Ilecord, to which 

 reference has already been made. I see that all that we know now of 

 the obvious characters of the imagines H. uictitans, H. lucens, and H. 

 palndifi, and their parallel variation, was known then. The facts 

 remain exactly as they were written, the differentiations of these three 

 species are there for those who seek them, I can add practically 

 nothing to them. 



I have, as will be seen above, no false sense of modesty as to what 

 I know and what I do not know about the Hydrcecias of the "uictitans 

 group." Stated in this absurdly truculent and assertive manner, it 

 will draw attention to at least one of the puzzles still remaining to be 

 solved in the British fauna, puzzles infinitely more difficult than some 

 of those which have been attempted wnth regard to the Tropical fauna, 

 and infinitely more interesting, because workers at the British species 

 can get their own material — alive and illustrating in its living 

 activities the phenomena we wish to explain in the one case, whilst, in 

 the other, the Avorker is dependent so much, if not entirely, on the 

 dead material collected by others. At any rate, the path is open to 

 the stay-at-homes to breed these insects side by side, to discover the 

 differences they exhibit in each of their early stages, to determine, in 

 fact, if the eggs, larv;>', and pup* of luccns and crinanennia are more 

 easily separable by obvious characters of structure or habit than are 

 the imagines. 



The South=eastern Pyrenees in early June. 



By a. S. TETLEY, M.A., F.E.S. 



At the beginning of last June I spent a week in the upper valley 

 of the Aude in the Eastern Pyrenees, and, as the district seems to have 

 been very little visited by the entomologist, it ma_y be as w'ell to set on 

 record some of the more interesting lepidoptera observed. Our head- 

 quarters were Axat, a small place of some five or six hundred inhabi- 

 tants, its one street running close to, and parallel with, the river, and 

 surrounded by low bare hills with forest-clad mountains in the back- 

 ground. It can be easily reached by rail from Carcassonne by Quillan, 

 and from it a good road runs to Mont Louis, and so over the frontier 

 into Spain. Limestone is the prevailing formation in the neighbour- 



