﻿THBRA VARIATA IN BRITAIN. 215 



distinctions of habitat and food-plant claimed for it on the 

 Continent. In our early literature, the only hint with which I 

 am acquainted is a note by Sir Thomas Moncreiffe in ' The 

 Scottish Naturalist,' vol. iv., p. 241 : " We have a dark and a 

 pale variety here, which Mr. Herd believes to be different 

 insects. He tells me the larvae are quite distinct, and that from 

 one form he always breeds the dark insect, and from the other 

 the paler." But as darkness and paleness are not the obvious 

 distinctions of the two species before us, and no mention is 

 made of different food-plants (the record is simply "common 

 among Scots fir"), not much use can be made of the note. I 

 am, however, able to add to Major Robertson's two other 

 records. Dr. E. A. Cockayne has detected in his collection a 

 single female of T. variata which he took on June 10th, 1901, on 

 a spruce in a wood of oak and spruce in Berkshire. He spent 

 an hour in the same locality this year without seeing either 

 variata or oheliscata. The Rev. C. E. Raven, of Cambridge, has 

 had a very interesting experience. The week after Easter he 

 was beating spruce in the New Forest for larva of Boarmia 

 ribeata (ahietaria), and beat among them a large number of what 

 he assumed to be oheliscata; of these he kept some twenty-five 

 to thirty to renew his series. They commenced to emerge by 

 the end of April, the first being a beautiful female aberration of 

 variata, bronze-coloured, with no bar, and of a very marbled 

 appearance, and washed with green in certain lights. Then 

 came a typical grey female variata, but after this, with the 

 exception of one male variata and one female which Mr. Raven 

 regards as *' as nearly as possible intermediate," all (some 

 fifteen) were typical oheliscata. Mr. Raven has kindly invited 

 me to study his material closely, as soon as an opportunity 

 offers, and in the unlikely event of my judgment differing from 

 his, I will report to readers of the ' Entomologist ' later. 

 Neither he nor Major Robertson has as yet detected any distinc- 

 tion in the larvae, but the latter has kindly promised to send me 

 some, in the hope that I may be more fortunate. 



With the exception of Mr. Raven's, I have no record of 

 oheliscata feeding on spruce. The testimony, both British and 

 foreign, is unanimous to the fact that its natural food-plant is 

 Scotch fir, and as this is our only indigenous British pine, the 

 dominance of oheliscata in this country is not surprising ; but 

 there must have been hundreds of opportunities, ancient alid 

 modern, for the introduction of variata (which has never yet been 

 recorded on Pinns sylvestris) with other species of pine {sens, 

 lat.), and it is quite possible — though I have hazarded a conjec- 

 ture of recent importation — that it has been sedentary among 

 us for a very long period. The question of food-plant, moreover, 

 though important, must not be over-pressed, as neither species 

 is absolutely monophagous. Spormann (Progr. Gymn. Strah 



