idis.;! 331 



the open sandliills, the colours of the species, though variable as usual, are quite 

 normal. During my stay there last Aug\ist I did little entomological work, and, 

 owing to military restrictions, no night-work. But for a short time on each of 

 my last two days I collected a considerable number of larvae of A gratis ripue, 

 which were most abundant just beneath the sand where Salsola kali grew. 

 Almost every little scraggy plant had its larvae, which varied in size from quite 

 small to full growth, so I was able to pick out the big ones and leave the smaller. 

 As I lifted aside one of the plants to get at the sand beneath, a nice male 

 specimen of Luperina guencei dropped out. — Geo. T. Pobritt, Elm Lea, Dalton, 

 Huddersfield : November 2nd, 1915. 



Simulium equinum L. (Edw.), and E^irycnemus elegans Mg., t>i Scotland. — 

 Mr. F. W. Edwards has kindly examined a number of my Scottish specimens of 

 SiniuHmn. and finds among them two females of S. equinum, a species which he 

 states in liis paper in last month's issue of this magazine (p. 308) has not yet 

 been recorded from Scotland. These two specimens were taken by myself 

 beside the River Tyne at East Linton, Haddingtonshire, on April 21st, 1913. 

 As more fully recorded in the " Scottish Naturalist" (1915, p. 2S7), I captured 

 a female of the rare Chironomid, Eurycnemus elegans, in Glen Spean, West 

 Inverness-shire, on July 23rd last. — William Evans, 38, Morningside Park, 

 Edinburgh : November bth, 1915. 



Jibstrarts of %tn\\\ literature. 



BY HUGH SCOTT, M.A., F.L.S., F.E.S. 



Harrison, L. : (i) Mallophaga from Aptertx, and their Signifi- 

 OANCE: w^iTH A NoTE ON THE Gbnus Eallicola. Parasitology, Vol. 8, 

 No. 1, pp. 88-100, June, 1915. 



(ii) The Eespiratory System of Mallophaga. T.c., pp. 101-127. 



In a previous abstract {ante, p. 244) a short account Avas given of Harrison's 

 paper on " The Mallophaga as a possible clue to Bird Phylogeny," in which was 

 elaborated the idea that a study of these parasites may provide one source of 

 light on the vexed question of the phyletic relationships of their hosts. The first 

 of the two papers now under review is an example of the application of this 

 idea. No Mallophaga have previously been recorded from the remarkable 

 flightless nocturnal birds of the New Zealand genus Apteryx. Harrison has ex- 

 amined skins of five species and discovered on them three species of Mallo- 

 phaga, all new to science, and placed in a new sub-genus Aptericola of the genus 

 Rallicola. The latter contains compact and easily separable groups of species. 

 Thus, those of the sub-genus Rallicola s. str. are confined to Rails, and are 

 found on all sorts of Rails all over the world ; while Aptericola, as stated above, 

 is found only on Apteryx, and therefore only in New Zealand. Now Apteryx has 

 generally been placed among the Ratitao, but the parasites of the remaining 

 Ratitae (ostriches, emus, etc.) have nothing in common with those of Apteryx. 

 Harrison states explicitly that he regards the evidence afforded by the parasites 

 as only one soxu'ce of information concerning bird relationships, and that the 



