1882.] 39 



to lay more thaii three eggs on the few plants confined with her or 

 with them — for there remains the posibility that perhaps three females 

 were confined and each laid one egg, knowing there would be barely 

 enough sustenance for a single larva — but, however this may have 

 been, it would seem that in nature the female would deposit her eggs 

 singly^ probably in the corolla or on the calyx of a flower, just here 

 and there one, in proportion to the abundance of the plant. 



I know not if this larva had been seen by any human eye since 

 the time of Carl von Tischer, but the time for it to be found in this 

 country had come, for on the 17th of June, I received a fui'ther very 

 kind attention from Mr. Stainton in the arrival of a full-grown larva 

 of arhuti, which he had gathered by chance while getting some G. 

 vulgatum for a Coleopteron in the field where arhuti flew ; this larva 

 in no way varied from those I had reared, and proved to be only 

 twenty-four hours later in maturing : curiously enough this incident 

 was repeated similarly by the Rev. J. Hellins, to whom I had sent a 

 larva of arhuti reared from an egg laid, I presume, loWiin a flower of 

 C. arvense (as after many repeated close searches I failed to find more 

 than the two before mentioned on arvense), and he, returning home 

 w ith some of that species for food on July 2nd, found a larva of arhuti 

 emerging from one of the seed capsules he had gathered. 



The egg of arhuti is globular, about | mm. in diameter, having a 

 slight depression beneath, it seems thin-shelled and finely pitted all 

 over, shining, and is of full yellow colour, turning rather brownish 

 just before hatching on the seventh day. 



The newly-hatched larva is white, with brown head and a narrow 

 brown plate on the second segment. After living hidden within a 

 seed-capsule and feeding on the unripe contents for about from fif- 

 teen to seventeen days, during which it has got through its earliest 

 moultings and acquired a colouring that assimilates most wonderfully 

 well with that of the capsule of the plant, as it waits outside for its 

 penultimate moult ; it has a brown head streaked and spotted with 

 darker brown, and the body is either of a pale watery-green colour or 

 slightly tinged with pinkish-grey, and marked with a dark green dorsal 

 line, a whitish sub-dorsal line, and a stouter white spiracular line, the 

 ventral legs clear and nearly colourless : after this moult it is nearly 

 6 mm. long, the head and second segment pale brown with slightly 

 darker brown marks, the rest of the body much deeper and richer 

 coloured than before, either a greenish-grey or a pinkish-grey ground 

 — as both varieties occur at this stage, and now the dark slaty-green 

 dorsal line runs in the middle of a broad softened stripe of paler 



