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habits and characteristics, food supply and life-history, with remarks on the 

 individual range of colours, and relative proportions of the sexes, based on 

 the examination of numerous living specimens of various ages kept under 

 continuous observation for more than a year. — 2) Botanical. — 3) Descrip- 

 tion of a new Species of Astralium from New Britain. By C. Hedle.y, 

 F.L.S., and Arthur Willey, D.Sc. A. moniliferum, n. sp., allied to the 

 Japanese A. triumphans] dredged in 30 — 40 fathoms on a shelly bottom. — 

 4) On a rare Variation in the Shell of Pterocera lambis^ Linn. By Arthur 

 Willey, D.Sc. (Communicated by J. P. Hill, F.L.S.) A series of 67 spe- 

 cimens of this common tropical species from New Britain and the Eastern 

 Archipelago of New Guinea has been examined. Numerous instances of 

 substantive variation were met with, the more striking of which relate to 

 the curvature of the digitations, their length, the intervals between them, 

 and the extent to which the apical whorls of the shell are involved in, con- 

 cealed by, or fused with the posterior digitation. There is also much varia- 

 tion as to the stage of growth at which the deposition of callus on the outer 

 lip of the shell takes place. In three specimens only occurred an extra labial 

 digitation, intercalated between the second and third normal ones. This is 

 probably to be identified as corresponding with the fourth in P. millepeda, 

 which has nine labial digitations, of which the intercalated ones are the se- 

 cond and fourth, and probably the seventh. The significance of the appea- 

 rance, by variation, of an extra labial digitation in P. larnbis^ which has 

 normally six, is recognised when it is remembered that in P. elongata^ Sw., 

 there are eight, in P. violacea^ Sw., ten, and in P. chiragra, Linn., five. — 

 Mr. Steel exhibited a fine series of beautifully preserved specimens of 

 Peripatus from Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand. — Mr. Froggatt 

 exhibited living specimens [çf and Ç) of Coelostoma australe, described in 

 1890 by Mr. Maskell in the Society's Proceedings (Second Series, v., 280). 

 The male is a very beautiful and rare insect. Six were taken, round the stump 

 upon which the female was found, the first examples the exhibitor had ever 

 seen. — Mr. Froggatt also exhibited a number of the larvae of the Acacia 

 Goat Moth [Zeuzera [Eudoxyla] eucalypti]^ victims of an attack of a fungoid 

 growth allied to Cordyceps^ and turned into ^'vegetable caterpillars," so called. 

 Some of the specimens were cut out of the trunks of Acacias {A. longifolia] 

 growing near Manly, in which they were found in the tunnels formed by the 

 larvae. Others were from larvae taken alive and kept in breeding boxes; 

 probably they had become infected previously, as after living for months 

 they changed into similar hard masses. The late Mr. OllifF in one of his 

 latest papers in the Agricultural Gazette upon Australian Entomophytes, in 

 describing the hosts of Cordyceps says that it attacks only subterranean root- 

 feeding larvae, and never those of true wood borers, as so often stated by 

 entomologists. The specimens exhibited bear out his statements, for the 

 fungus concerned is a species without the projecting clubbed growth, which 

 would be at a disadvantage in the confined tunnels of a wood-boring cater- 

 pillar. It may belong to the genus Xylostroma^ which is often found in the 

 centre of decaying trees. — The President (Henry Deane, Esq.) exhibited 

 a "Cotton-grass Snake" [Typhlops sp.) forwarded by Mr. A. G. Little from 

 Menindie, N.S.W. 



