54 THE entomologist's record. 



ci/ni)>ifoniiis is common in this district if one likes to work for the 

 larvii^ and pup;e. I bred about 40 this year ; my hist emergence being 

 August HnV, while my iirst was May 14th. Aiithnirura filipcrnhdae 

 was conniion on ]3ox Hill in the middle of August, but rather worn. 

 On May 20th I took a fine series of Jhrnthis mdaiu in Worth Forest, 

 including one of the finest suffused aberrations I have seen, a specimen 

 the whole surface of which was black-brown. — H. Baker-Sly (F.E.S), 

 Horley, Surrey. (This communication unfortunately miscarried and 

 only reached me in mid- January. — H.J.T.). 



(CURRENT NOTES AND SHORT NOTICES. 



We quote the following from the account of the Oxford Meeting of 

 the International Congress of Entomology in the (Jan. Ent. by H. H. 

 Lyman. " Considering the very considerable expense incurred by govern- 

 ments and institutions in sending representatives to them, is it not of the 

 jiighest importance that they should not be merely very pleasant reunions 

 where highly interesting papers are read by eminent scientists, and 

 where afterwards the pipes of social peace are smoked around the 

 social board, but that the many pressing questions of international 

 importance should be given first place and some attempt made to solve 

 them, instead of referring them to committees from one congress to 

 another, while every year confusion, at least in nomenclature, is 

 becoming worse confounded ? It is quite true that some attempts 

 were made by some authors to deal with matters of international 

 concern, but such attempts were few, and, unfortunately, some of the 

 ideas were crude." 



In another column we print a lament at what appears to the 

 writer an absence of aim in present-day entomology, and an endless 

 and useless repetition in what is being done by entomologists in 

 general. Probably the writer is not in touch with our various Societies, 

 or he would know that an immense amount of silent work is going on 

 and that each worker is the centre of a band of willing helpers, who 

 furnish material and often facts, field observations, and experiences. 

 Names of these crowd into our mind, and without being invidious in 

 choice, we may mention L. B. Prout, who, after years of apparent 

 " repetition," is gradually becoming the world's authority on the 

 Geometers, F. N. Pierce and Rev. C. R. N. Burrows whose study of the 

 genitalia of the British Gt'oinctridae will ere long be given to the woild, 

 H. St. J. K. Donisthorpe, whose original work on the economy of 

 British ants is so often related in our pages, A. E. Tonge, who has 

 now photographs and notes of the ova of considerably more than half 

 the fh'itish so-called Macro-lepidoptera, Dr. Chapman, who is devoting 

 the major portion of his varied work to the investigation of the more 

 closely allied and obscure species of European Li/caenidcw, Dr. Burr, 

 who, besides his faunistic work in the Orthoptera generally, takes 

 every opportunity to get material for his work on the Earwigs of the 

 world, G. T. Bethune-Baker, busy man as he is in many ways, who 

 has in preparation a most important work on the classification of the 

 Lycaenidac of the world, Claude Morley, whose books on the difficult 

 group the Irhnemiioniflae will be standard works for all time, W. G. 

 Sheldon, whose investigation of the habits and life histories of the 

 rarest of our Arctic continental butterflies fills a much needed gap, 



