158 Journal New York Entomological Society. t^"'- xxvi. 



had cast aside into a heap the day before, crushing it into finer bits 

 over the rubber blanket. From this I got ten specimens which had 

 escaped my previous search. I then cut a long pole and beat down 

 the remainder of the original home, getting therefrom twenty-five 

 additional specimens. I had, therefore, secured altogether fifty-four 

 of the weevils from the one bunch or colony, and put the species 

 securely on the map as an inhabitant of Florida. During the six 

 winters I have spent at Dunedin, I have beaten similar bunches of 

 dead leaves and twigs many times, not only in Skinner's Hammock 

 but in numerous others, and had never happened upon Hormops. 

 Why it waxed fat and flourished in numbers in that one particular 

 bunch of rubbish only the fates and the weevils know and they are 

 forever silent. 



I sent a brief announcement of my discovery and a pair of the 

 weevils to friend Leng, and shortly afterward left for a collecting 

 trip in the Okeechobee region. When I returned three weeks later 

 I found awaiting me a letter from him saying : " I certainly congratu- 

 late you upon this remarkable capture and it happens most oppor- 

 tunely, for Dr. David Sharp is at work upon an exhaustive study of 

 the genitalia of weevils and I have been trying to supply him with 

 the genera he lacked, of which, of course, Honuops was one. He 

 says that specimens killed in ether and afterwards transferred to 

 distilled water give much better results than dried specimens, because 

 in such the delicate muscles are too stiff for manipulation under the 

 microscope. I hope that you may be able to find more of this inter- 

 esting insect, so as to send Dr. Sharp specimens killed as he suggests." 



Now both ether and distilled water were difficult to obtain about 

 Dunedin, and I concluded that the best thing I could do would be to 

 try and find some living specimens and send them to Dr. Sharp. On 

 the day after my return, therefore, I sought again the hammock, and, 

 working over the old pile of debris, found three more specimens which 

 I started alive across the Atlantic to him. Taking home three or four 

 quarts of the comminuted rubbish, I put it into some covered jars, and 

 later, on each of two different occasions, found in it a pair of the 

 beetles, the total catch for the season being sixty-one individuals. It 

 is probable that the weevils had clung closely to one side or hidden 

 beneath a folded edge of a leaf, and so escaped observation. It is 

 possible also that some were in the pupal stage and emerged as adults 



