1914 ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 87 



autumn orchids. Just where we strike the railway is an immense patch of that 

 rather rare plant the Grass of Parnassus, whose green-veined creamy white 

 blossoms in August and September make as brave a show as the Anemone in June 

 and July. It is a sure sign of springs in the soil and further south there are 

 traces of an old sphagnum moss swamp ; though it is years since the railway hacked 

 away the trees and shrubs, marsh pyrola and the showy Ladies' Slipper annually 

 rear their upright stalks and unfold their blossoms for gauze-winged visitors to 

 gather nectar from beneath the July sun. 



Here, along the right of way, grows wild Asparagus, and on it you will find 

 at least one species of the Asparagus beetle, which we shall take to stand for Tribe 

 III. The first specimens I ever saw of this beetle were in a Kentish garden; they 

 belonged to the species commonly known as the striped Asparagus beetle, and at 

 first I did not recognize the insect; all I had by way of guide was an old book of 

 Stevens with colored illustrations that were several times magnified. The picture 

 showed a gorgeous insect, in rich dark green and cream hues, which to my excited 

 imagination must be nearly as large as a June Bug. I found, however, to do the 

 old naturalist justice, that though in the dead insect the sutural stripe, the basal 

 marks and the cross-bar on the elytra appear black on a ground color of opaque 

 straw-yellow, in life these colours are a rich, vivid, dark green on a sroimd oolnnr 

 of translucent cream, extremely beautiful when scanned with a lens. The 12- 

 spotted species which seems the commoner in Ontario and is apparently more 

 hardy I first found in the late Dr. Brodie's back garden in Toronto. Until five 

 or six years ago neither species had made its way to Port Hope, but the spotted 

 one appeared in several gardens then, followed a season or two later by the striped, 

 and two seasons ago I first found the Crioceris duodecimpunctata on wild 

 Asparagus. There is only one other genus in this tribe ; the Lema, of which there 

 are no less than sixteen species in North America; only a few occur in Ontario, and 

 [ have only found one, — Lema trilineata, a beetle which sometimes shares with one 

 of the Blister beetles the title of " the old-fashioned Potato Beetle " ; it feeds on 

 various plants of the Potato family and I have found it in some abundance on the 

 Physalus or Ground Cherry, while searching vainly for specimens of Coptocycla 

 clavata, the rough Tortoise Beetle. Before we leave the Asparagus and return to 

 our little brook a mile north, I may mention that it was on some oartlou Asparagus 

 at Lakefield that I found my reward for a day's umpiring at a cricket match, in the 

 shape of a beetle called Anomoea laticlavia. This is the only species in the fourth 

 Tribe known to me; for though North America has seven genera in the tribe and 

 over twenty species, there are but four genera represented in Canada, each by a 

 single species. It is for a Chrysomelian a decidedly large insect, stout and of 

 striking appearance, light-brown in colour, with a black sutural stripe, which 

 is slightly thckened from about midway down the elytra to near the apex. I have 

 never since seen it on Asparagus, but more than once I have taken it feeding in 

 large numbers on willow-shrubs about the right of way, a few miles north of our 

 present halting-place on the Peterborough railway. Last year I discovered it very 

 abundant, almost a pest, on wild grape-vines near Sackville's Swamp, on the south 

 shore of Eice Lake, between Bewdley and Gore's Landing. 



We now return to the little brook where our first Donacias were captured. 

 Just over the fence, on our right hand, is a small pine wood out of which indeed 

 it is that our little brook emerges. This wood is a great place for early morels ; it 

 has also yielded some very interesting species of Longicorn and CJerid on the 

 occasional windfall of white pine, l^owards the north-east side of it w'lpro our 



