64 LEPIDOPTERA. 



September to Juue — and following broods quite un- 

 certainly — on figs and other dried fruits ; malt, maize, 

 meal, almonds, walnuts, and other species of nuts, locust 

 beans, pineapple, carraway-seeds, and even yeast-cakes ; 

 spinning silken tubes and loose web all about the food, for 

 concealment. Even devouring dead insects when other 

 food fails, and sometimes causing disappointment to the 

 entomologiyt, since larvte I'apidly hatched from eggs auto- 

 maticallj' expelled by the females when dead upon the 

 setting boards, will devour the bodies of their dead parents, 

 as well as other species, and leave on the boards nothing 

 but the wings. 



Pupa slender, very glossy and without percejitible sculp- 

 ture ; anal segment rather thick and bluntly rounded off; 

 cremaster hardly perceptible, except for a few short hooked 

 bristles ; colour light yellow-brown. In a slight grej-ish- 

 white silken cocoon among the larva-food, or in any corner. 



Another of the devourers of stored grain, seeds, and fruits, 

 perhaps at some rather distant period introduced, since it 

 usually frequents only considerable warehouses, stores, malt- 

 houses, oil-mills, and similar buildings, and has no out-of- 

 door haunts. When sitting in its usual manner with closed 

 wings on a wall or boarding it tias a singular likeness to a 

 grain of black oats, the abrupt change of colour along with 

 its shining surface giving the appearance of the usual reflec- 

 tion of light on the shining oat-grain. The first notice of its 

 occurrence in these Islands seems to have been by my late 

 friend and guide. Mr. H. T. Stainton, in the year 1847, 

 when a single specimen was taken by Mr. Edwin Shepherd 

 in his own house in London. It is now very abundant in 

 the London warehouses, and is found in suitable situations 

 in Kent, Devon, Berks, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, 

 Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, Norfolk, Derbyshire, 

 Lancashire — especially in the Liverpool and Manchester 

 warehouses — and in Yorkshire ; also at Darlington and 



