3. ANTHRAX ~ 531 



lar^^e number captured in the same locality were all males, but of forty-four 

 spe'cimens taken by Mr C. J. Wainwright at the Land's End and St Ives 

 from July 29 to August 8, 1899, ten were males and thirty-four females ; 

 these records tend to show that the males appear late in June or early in July, 

 while the females do not appear until the middle of July, and after that 

 date both sexes probably linger on to the beginning of September. A 

 female taken at St Ives by Mr C. J. Wainwright on August 1 and a male at 

 the Land's End on July 13 were very unusually large but were obviously 

 not distinct, while I suspect that a very small specimen seen by me at 

 l»allino' also belonged to this species. Colonel Yerbury exhibited at the 

 Enton?olooical Society of London on November 21, 1900, a specimen which 

 had been'' bred by Mr Holland of the Hope Museum, Oxford, from a 

 Lepidopterous pupa found in sand at St Helens, Isle of Wight, the pupa 

 havino- been found on July 7 and the fly emerging on July 12, 1899; 

 Webster has recorded (Bull. Dep. Agric. Ent., xxii., 44) a North American 

 species of Anthrax as parasitic on Agrotis herilis. 



Synonymy.— It is at present very difficult to disentangle the synonymy of the 

 European species of the group distinguished by Osten Sacken under the name ot 

 Ih/alanthrax, because no good and accurate comparative descriptions have been 

 published by any of the old authors. The original description of £tho Fantsnis ot 

 Rossi is as follows : 



" * 1433. B. Paniscus. 



"Xo?ir/. 6.1. Lat.2A. . . ...... 



" Hirta, flavescens, compressa, abdomine nigro, fulvo-strigoso, alis hyalinis costa 



" Statura et magnitudo B. Ilottentottce eique valde affinis, et forte mera varietas, 

 " sed corpus' in hac magis compressum, et magis elongatum. Thorax, et abdomen 

 " constanter nigra dorso fere nudo, pilis rufis lateralibus longiusculis hirta. Am 

 " reo-io obtusa fasciculo pilorum pilis albis intermixto. Subtus yix pubescens. 

 " Pedes nigri, tenues. Alae hyalinae costa nigra. Variat colore villorum minus 



" rufo. 



" Habitat in silvis frequens in floribus Umbellatis." ^ ., ^- ,, 



I see nothing contradictory in this description as "abdomine . . . tulvo-strigoso 

 mav well apply to the female, while " costa nigra " is counterbalanced by costa 

 " fusca " It is certain that Rossi had a species before him which had the abdomen 

 narrower and more truncate than his A. hottentotta and which had a black anal 

 tuft between two white tufts. I sent a pair of our English species to Bezzi in 

 order to be certain that it occurred in Italy, and he wrote me that both sexes 

 ao-reed perfectly with the species which he possessed under the name ot A. Famscus ; 

 he also remarked that it was the rarest Italian species of the group except A^itkr 

 halteralis Kow., the commonest ones being hottentotus L. {flavus bchm ) and 

 circumdatus Mg. {hottentotus Schin.). A specimen in the Hope Museum at Oxtord 

 was labelled A.flava. 



3. A. cingulatus Meigen. Wings hyaline except for a very narrow 

 blackish brown foremargin which does not extend below the subcostal 

 vein. Abdomen with three conspicuous bands of yellow scales in the 

 male, and five in the female. 



Very similar to A. circumdatus, but with the darkened fore- 

 margin of the wing much more restricted and the male with only 

 three bands of pale scales across the abdomen ; also similar to A. 

 Paniscus, but the male with a banded abdomen and the female 

 with the bands more conspicuous. 



