218 THE entomologist's record. 



during nearly forty years' collecting. — W. A. Luff, La Chaumiere' 

 Brock Road, Guernsey. June 25th, 1905. 



SCIENTIFIC NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS. 



Protective resemblance of pupa of Pieris brassic^ to lichen. 

 — Near the coast of North Devonshire, at the end of April last, Icanie 

 across a pupa of Pieris hransicae attached to the trunk of a tree that 

 was much covered with rough lichen. The resemblance of the pupa 

 to the lichen was marvellous — protective resemblance could not have 

 been carried further. The jagged contours of the pupa had much to 

 do with this, as well as the coloration and markings. I may add that 

 an entomological friend was with me at the time, and, though I took 

 him up to the tree and told him to look there for a pupa of P. brassicae, 

 he failed to detect it. Yet I watched his eye pass over the creature 

 more than once. — Selwyn Image, M.A., 20, Fitzroy Street, W. July 

 Sr,l, 1905. 



t^URRENT NOTES. 



At the meeting of the Entomological Society of London, held on 

 June 7th, 1905, Dr. Karl Jordan communicated an important note upon 

 the " Variability of the Genitalia in Lepidoptera." He observed that, 

 for a long time, it was the opinion of systematists that the organs of 

 copulation in insects were practically constant within a species, and 

 that, therefore, a form of insect which was found to be different in 

 these organs was considered to be a distinct species. He demonstrated 

 about ten years ago in the lepidoptera, and has done so on several 

 occasions since, that there is a certain amount of individual variability 

 in the organs of copulation, and that this variability is independent of 

 the variability in other organs, for instance, in the wings. Individuals 

 which are aberrant in patter* may be normal in the copulatory organs, 

 and specimens with marked deviation from the typical in these 

 organs have normal wing-patterns. Dimorphism in the wings, so 

 strongly marked in many lepidoptera, is not accompanied by 

 differences in the organs of copulation. On the other hand he has 

 found that there is often a more or less marked geographical vari- 

 ability in the organs of copulation accompanying variability in the 

 wings, a geographical variety of a butterfly or moth being, in most 

 cases, characterised by some distinction in the wing and the organs of 

 copulation. The bearing, on the evolution of species, of this contrast 

 of geographical and non-geographical variation is obvious. It 

 appeared to him easy to understand why the specimens of the same 

 locality, which copulate together, are on the whole the same in the 

 organs of copulation, but it is more difficult in the case of seasonal 

 varieties. If the causes of seasonal variation have anything to do 

 with the origin of new species, one should expect that seasonal forms, 

 which are often so very different from one another in the wings, would 

 also be different in the organs of copulation. He has examined many 

 seasonally dimorphic species without result. Lately, however, he had 

 come across a solitary instance of seasonal variability in the organs of 

 copulation. The spring form of Papilio xuthus is slightly but 

 distinctly and almost constantly different from the summer form in 

 the ' harpe ' of the clasper, the dentate portion of the ' harpe ' being 



