102 t Mft y 



That the insect does not now occur in East Anglia I have not the 

 least hesitation in stating to be absolutely certain. I have collected in 

 Suffolk for over twenty years, and have shown (" Essex Naturalist," 

 XIV, 1905, p. 61) in " The Beetles of the Eastern Counties," the total 

 species recorded from Essex to then be 1,649; from Norfolk, 1,803; 

 and from Suffolk, 1,900; so the supposition that it could have been 

 overlooked is unthinkable. 



That it ever occurred here is very nearly as improbable. In 

 Ireland it appears to be nearly confined to, or at least most usually 

 captured on, peat at considerable altitudes* ; and there to be attached 

 to a situation, such as the underside of large stones lying on the top 

 of low turf walls of a foot or two in height ; in such a place I have 

 taken it myself on Clare Island. But in East Anglia no similar 

 situation is to be found, and the three localities instanced are all 

 practically on sea-level. The Burgh Marshes are about four miles 

 inland from Yarmouth, and Belton little more than a mile to the south 

 of them ; Halvergate marshes are some three miles to the W.N.W. of 

 these, and Bungay about a dozen miles due S.W. ; but, be it noted, all 

 are on the banks of, or connected by dykes with the same river, the 

 Waveney, which debouches into the Yare at Burgb. Mr. E. A. Elliott 

 and I have not infrequently collected at Bungay, Belton, and Burgh, 

 without finding a trace of the present species anywhere in Suffolk, or 

 in the parts of Norfolk, Essex, Cambs., Herts, Northants, or Lines., 

 visited at odd times. 



Last autumn I made a pilgrimage to its reputed home at 

 Halvergate. " To Marshes " says the sign- board at the cross-roads ; 

 and truly. As far as the eye can see in this direction is a flat 

 waste, unrelieved by a single cottage or tree, stretching away to 

 distant misty windmills in a dead level, intersected only by reed-choked 

 dykes, connected by rough gates giving upon the cattle-marshes, and 

 their relative lodes. In its early morning mist it still looked what it 

 once was : a huge estuary, some ten miles north and south from 

 Stokesby to Haddiscoe, and nine miles east and west from Yarmouth, 

 bounded by the erstwhile Norfolk and Suffolk coasts, and here rising 

 very slightly to Wickhampton Church jutting into the plain to the 

 west of these marshes, but further south it runs inland to Beccles and 

 along the river to Bungay. 



* Mr. John W. Ellis, M.B., F.E.S., gives a very typical locale for the species ("Field Natural- 

 ist's Quarterly," 1903, p. 23S) in his " Mourne Mountains and their Beetle Fauna :" he tells us 

 that Slieve Donard, the highest of the peaks (2796 feet), " is one of the very few localities in the 

 British Islands for that handsome ground-heetle, Catabus clathratus, whose violet-black body, 

 over an inch in length, with rows of bright coppery impressions on the wing-covers, must make 

 it a conspicuous object on its nativ< hillsides. The search for this insect formed the raison d'etre 

 of our visit to the Mourne Mountains last Easter." 



