3-8 LEPIDOPTERA. 



hinder area sometimes nearly black, in other cases dull white, 

 spotted and streaked with golden brown ; cilia dark brown. 

 Hind wiugs and cilia dark smoky brown. Female similar. 



Undersides of all the wings dark smoky brown. 



On the wing in June and July. 



Lakva long and slender, much wrinkled and with deeply 

 divided segments; delicate pale green with the internal 

 dorsal vessel distinctly visible, red-brown, and showing as a 

 double bar; head bright chestnut; dorsal and anal plates 

 greenish. 



September and October and till the spring, in stems of 

 Starltiji pcdudri'i; eating out the pith, and leaving the 

 hollowed space partly filled with excrement, but not so much 

 so as to interfere with the movements, up and down, of the 

 larva. 



Plta slender, bright brown ; wing and limb covers shining, 

 segments less so. yet not dull, each with a sharj) ridge of 

 close fine bristles pointing backward ; crem aster short and 

 blunt, furnished with minute hooked bristles ; in a silken 

 cocoon j ust beneath one of the joints of the stem of the food- 

 plant, or of another plant of the same species ; emergence 

 takes place through a small hole made by the larva in the 

 joint. 



This species frequents fens and marshes, where its food- 

 plant grows. Hardly recognised as a distinct species until 

 the year 1878, when its larva was found in Wicken Fen, 

 Cambs, by Lord Walsiugham — who kindly furnished the 

 specimens from which the above descriptions of larva and 

 pupa were taken — since then taken frequently in the same 

 Fen, and in other wet localities in Sussex, Dorset, Gloucester- 

 shire, Herts, Essex, Suffolk, and Herefordshire ; possible 

 also in Yorkshire. Abroad it seems only to have been 

 recognised in Holland. 



