GO iHE entomologist's RECORl). 



pupae of this silkworm; one or two died, but, with a single exception, 

 the rest emerged during the summer and autumn of that year. The 

 emergence was spread over the whole summer and autumn, and when 

 winter came there was still one large heavy cocoon from which no 

 imago had been disclosed. Though I had never before met with an 

 instance, it is not, I believe, unknown for a Saturniid to go over a 

 second year. The curious thing is that when I cut the cocoon open to 

 make sure of the pupa being still alive, I found a large female pupa, 

 fat and healthy, but reversed in the cocoon — that is head downwards, 

 with the last segments towards the point of emergence. It was easy to 

 see that the pupa could not reverse itself in the cocoon ; possibly the larva 

 had been mystified by the cocoon having been taken down as soon as 

 it was spun, and laid Hat, or reversed. Had the abnormal position 

 anything to do with the delayed emergence ? In spite of the pupa 

 being kept in the opened cocoon in a dry room indoors, a fine dark 

 moth emerged successfully on August 5th, 1895. — T. A. Chapman, M.D., 

 Firbank, Hereford. 



@-URRENT NOTES. 



Mr. Morris records Plnsia nioueta from Beading, and Mr. Phipps 

 the breeding of the same species from larvfe found at Tunbridge Wells, 

 whilst Mr. Thellusson records 15 Sphinx pinnstri, imagines from 

 Woodbridge (Suffolk), and the same entomologist has 100 larvae feeding. 



Mr. W. Harcourt Bath's paper [Entom., Sept.) on "The Origin of the 

 European Rhopalocera," may be summarised as follows : — (1) Tropical 

 America was the cradle of butterflies, hccause 5,000 out of 10,000 

 known species now exist there. (2) Butterflies had got from 

 Tropical America to the Alps, Pyrenees and Carpathians, before the 

 Glacial Epoch. (3) Such butterflies as there were, were driven 

 south by the ice, and were exterminated, or followed the ice back when 

 it receded. (4) Ernst Hoffmann considers that 178 out of 290 species 

 of European butterflies came from Siberia, 8 from Africa, 39 from 

 Asia. (5) The glacial species of butterflies ("the forms in- 

 habiting the more northern localities and higher elevations on the 

 mountains ") are often of a darker hue. (6) Owing to the absence 

 of austral species " the Sunny South of Spain " possesses fewer butter- 

 flies than Switzerland. The little bird over my shoulder propounds 

 the following : — (1) How did the butterflies get from their Garden of 

 Eden in Tropical America to the Alps, Pyrenees and Carpathians ? 

 (2) Since Mr. Ernst Hoffmann has already suggested the origin (?) of 

 220 out of 290 European species, what has Mr. ]^ath added to the dis- 

 cussion, or has he forgotten to tell us about the other 70 ? (8) What 

 proof has Mr. Bath that the " glacial species," as defined by himself, 

 are generally melanic ? (4) Is Mr. Bath aware that the genus Erehia 

 (which is about the only genus satisfying his definition) is, according 

 to Scudder, Chapman, and our best authorities, probably one of the 

 most recently evolved genera of butterflies, and by no means the 

 original stirps " of Professor VVeismann ? (5) Does Mr. Bath not 

 consider that the lumping of a flora into 6,000 feet in altitude (a day's 

 comfortable climb), equal in extent to a flora extending from " Sunny 

 Spain " to the North of Scandinavia, may have something to do with 

 the prepondcrcnce of species in the Alps, Caucasus and Pyrenees ? We 

 await, with some interest, other cogitations of this kind. Theory, we 

 know, but we want facts to support it. 



