1917.] ' 273 



4. nicjroaeneiis. — The two specimens so named are both c? c? of 

 hiptinctatiis Oliv. (The name niijroaeneus also was *' given " to 

 Shuckard by Samouelle.) 



Except /ero.r and nic/ricornis, hoi\\ of which I consider identical 

 with arijentatus Cm-tis, not one of these species has any claim to be 

 reckoned as British other than such as may be founded on its inclusion 

 in the Museum " British Collection." There is, indeed, an example 

 standing as hiptinctatus in the Dale Collection at Oxford, and Pro- 

 fessor Poulton kindly brought it to London that I might compare it 

 with Hhuckard's specimens ; but, after careful examination, I felt pretty 

 sm-e that it was merely a variety of our common uniglumis. As to 

 lineafus and l-i-nofatiis, no one has ever recorded a capture of them in 

 this country- ; and they are so unlike anything known as British, that 

 such a capture could hardly have been overlooked. 



Shuckard (as we have seen), when he visited the Museum, probably 

 about the year 1836, was unable to discover where any one of them was 

 taken. But long after (viz. in 18o8) Smith suggested that all of them, 

 and also nigripes, were " very probably taken by Dr. Leach in Devon- 

 sliire." Why he thought so, he does not tell us. But, if it be true, we 

 must believe that four different species of the same genus — not one of 

 which has ever reappeared in Britain — were taken within a few years by 

 one British collector in his own neighbourhood ! ! Surely this is quite 

 incredible. There may, however, have been this element of fact in 

 Smith's statement — that these, like so many other specimens of 

 Hymenoptera of all sorts, came into the Museum from or through 

 Dr. Leach, who, besides being himself a keen collector, was constantly 

 receiving (as the " Old Registers " now at S. Kensington prove) speci- 

 mens, foreign as well as British, from many correspondents — Klug, 

 Megerle, Latreille, etc. — some of which specimens he jdaced in the 

 Museum, while others may have arrived there after his retirement and, 

 l)crha])s, after his death. In fact, Smith himself later seems to have 

 gradually come round to a different view as to some of Leach's 

 " Devonshire (?) " captures. In 1862 (Ent. Ann. p. 96), he says, 

 " It has been ascertained that after the death of Dr. Leach a few 

 insects from the Continent, supposed to have been captured in England, 

 by accident were incorporated with the British collection." And in his 

 revised Catalogue of 1876 (Preface), he mentions that he no longer 

 considers Sphecodes fuscipennis (another Leachian specimen in B. M.) 

 to be a British insect. Yet even then, he still retains, in hopes of their 

 re-discovery, several species, whose claims to a place in the Bx-itish List 



