1891.] 271 



Artificially, it is difficult to bring about such a change of life and 

 food, even when the right growing plants have been selected. In the 

 present case it is therefore satisfactory to find the presence of the 

 winged forms of a tree species, which cannot well be mistaken, nestling 

 in numbers on a small trailing plant, previous to its descent into the 

 ground, much in the same manner as we see the Flnjlloxera descends 

 to the vine root at certain seasons. 



Haslemere : 



August 15th, 1891. 



APLOTA PALPELLA BEED. 

 BY JOHN H. WOOD, M.B. 



Tou will be interested to hear that I am breeding at the present 

 moment Aplota palpella. For several seasons I had noticed a strange 

 larva on an old mossy sandstone wall, and guessed it should be some- 

 thing good ; twice was I beaten in the attempt to rear it, but the 

 problem is at last solved, and now every afternoon I have the pleasure 

 of finding two or three A. palpella resting with folded wings on the 

 moss in my glass vessels. 



The larva lives gregariously, in silken galleries, on the surface of 

 the moss, and kills the plant in its progress, the dead moss afterwards 

 often becomes covered with a lichenous growth ; the larva feeds on 

 the moss, not on the lichen. July 31st, 1891. 



The first moth emerged on July 19th, and they kept on appearing 

 almost daily for a fortnight or better. Seeing what a good insect I 

 had bred, I went on the afternoon of July 23rd in search of the pupae, 

 of which I obtained a modest supply by stripping off a patch or two 

 of the moss where the galleries of the larvae were visible. These 

 galleries are of white silk, interwoven on the outside with fragments 

 of the moss. I hoped, too, that 1 might see the moth itself at Large, 

 but in this was disappointed, for I did not then know that its habit in 

 the day time is to sit with wings pressed close to its sides on its food 

 plant, depending for its protection so entirely on the likeness which 

 its yellow scaling gives it to a projecting bit of the moss, as scarcely 

 to be induced to move even by a touch of the finger. Yet I may add, 

 that it was active enough after dusk in my vessels, and skipped or ran 

 about, rather than flew, with wings carried out horizontally from the 

 body, in the jerky Oelechia fashion that is known so well. 



On August 15th I met with a worn specimen (the only one I ever 



