1880.) 155 



(? ratliei" lcs8 than 1 mm. in length, expanse of wings, 2-5 mm. Body slender, 

 light olive-brown, legs eoncolorous. Wings grey-white; halteres small, slender, bent, 

 hook-form. Antennro reddish-yellow, 10-jointed, 3rd and 10th joints longest, sub- 

 equal. Eyes and ocelli dark red. The two anal filaments long, white. 



The $ of this species is at once distinguished by the shortness o£ 

 the projecting filaments on the circumference, and the non-elongation 

 of two posterior ones, as in other species. 



On May ISth, in Mr. Stainton's forcing-pit, cucumber plants were 

 infested with a Dactylopius to that extent that the leaves were in a 

 state of collapse, each leaf having on its under-side a colony in all 

 stages of life. Among the cottony web, which was plentiful, I found 

 also, alongside the ribs of the leaf, some living males, which, however, 

 were not active. On July 24th females of the same species abounded 

 on cucumber plants in a frame on a hotbed, but there were no males. 

 Of these females I took several, and having subjected them for a long 

 time to the influence of the vapour of benzine, I deemed they were 

 dead, and gummed them on to card, bvit the next day I was surprised 

 to see that from each had been expelled a long string of cylindrical, 

 yellow eggs, joined together at their truncate ends ; looking again 

 after some days I found that the eggs had disappeared, and that the 

 larvse that had emerged had spread all over the small box that had 

 contained the females, carrying with them a cottony web, and that the 

 mothers had shrunk into shapeless masses. 



In his " Essai sur les Cochinelles," Signoret enumerates 18 species 

 of the genus Dactylopius, of which a prominent character is that the 

 body of the $ has a series of projecting filamental appendages on the 

 circumference, variation in these and other structural characters, of 

 more or less importance, being found to differentiate the respective 

 species ; yet it is a striking feature of the descriptions that each 

 species is said generally to resemble one or another of them. There 

 can, however, be no doubt as to the distinctness of that now in hand 

 (which was not known to vSignoret), by reason especially of the pe- 

 culiar shortness and equality in length of the circumferential append- 

 ages, and also, I think, that as it fits so well the description, there is 

 no question it is destructor, Comst. It is said to be very abundant 

 upon almost every variety of plant in the department greenhouses 

 (at Ithaca). The name destructor is, however, proposed for this 

 insect from the damage done by it to orange trees in Florida, 

 especially at Jacksonville and Micanopy, where it is the most serious 

 insect-pest of the orange (op. cit., p. 343). It is an addition to the 

 British List. 



8, Beaufort Gardens, Lewisham : 

 Oct. lOtk, 1886. 



