240 [October, 



Bloomfield, Messrs. A. E. J. Carter, C. W. Dale, Wm. Evans, J. Gordon, 

 J. Henderson, J. J. P. X. King, and E. E. Lowe, sent me the whole of 

 the examples in their collections ; Professor L. C. Miall, of Leeds Uni- 

 versity, allowed me the use of a fine set of specimens from the late 

 Dr. K. H. Meade's collection ; Mr. Claude Morley submitted a con- 

 siderable number of specimens from the Ipswich district ; Dr. R. E. 

 Scharff sent a very interesting collection of Irish specimens, mostly 

 collected and identified by Haliday ; Dr. David Sharp contributed all 

 the material in the Cambridge Museum collection ; Mr. G. H. Verrall 

 most generously lent me a complete and splendid series from his own 

 unrivalled collection ; Mr. James Waterston lent me many useful 

 Scottish examples; Dr. J. Wood, of Tarrington, sent a splendid set 

 of beautifully mounted specimens, chiefly from Herefordshire ; and 

 lastly, Col. Terbury allowed me the use of all the material in his 

 possession. To all these gentlemen I now tender my heartiest thanks 

 '—without their most generous aid the following account could cer- 

 tainly not have been written. 



The genus Hydrotcea, in the male sex, is sharply differentiated 

 from the rest of the Anthomyiidce by the presence of peculiar teeth 

 on the ventral side of the front femora, and for the purpose of identi- 

 fication this character alone is quite suflicient. The female sex, on 

 the other hand, is not so easy to distinguish, but the combination of 

 all the following characters will readily remove any doubt : — Galyptra 

 large, the under scale projecting considerably beyond the upper, wings 

 with the Gth longitudinal vein rather long, but ceasing at a considerable 

 distance from the margin, frons always with a pair of decussating bristles, 

 thorax with four post-sutural dorso-central bristles, and two sternopleural 

 bristles, one of lohich is at the upper anterior angle and the other at the 

 upper posterior angle, in the majority of species the front tibice are 

 without bristles, and lastly, the abdomen is usually unicolorous or 

 without dorsal stripe, never spotted. 



Thus the females of Hydrotcea may be distinguished from other 

 AnthomyiidcB by a variety of characters, most of which are found 

 singly in other genera. Only in Ophyra, as Stein points out, are the 

 whole of these found in combination as in Hydrotcea. It may be 

 helpful to emphasize these characters in another way, thus : the genera 

 of the Mydaea group, e. g., Eyetodesia, Mydcea, Spilogaster, &c., only 

 rarely possess decussating bristles, and on the other hand always 

 possess from 3-5 sterno-pleural bristles : those of the Anthomyia 

 group have only three post-sutural dorso-central bristles, while the 

 Gth longitudinal vein always reaches the margin of the wing ; Homa- 



