PROCEEDINGS OF THE SECOND ENTOMOLOGICAL MEETING aie 
But work of this sort requires very careful preliminary investigation. 
We should not want, for example, to bring in hyper-parasites which 
might attack parasites already present and doing good work. Then again 
there is a probability of finding parasites preying on the larvee, but these 
are fairly well protected inside the stems of the foodplant so that larval 
parasites are likely to be less effective than egg-parasites. [ must 
confess that I am a little doubtful whether we shall be able to find any 
effective parasites. As I said just now, Schenobius bipunctifer has a 
wide range over practically the whole of South-Hastern Asia and 1s 
known to occur throughout India, Burma, Ceylon, China, Formosa, 
Borneo, Singapore, Java and Sumatra, so that its area of distribution 
is pretty continuous and we may assume that it is a truly endemic species 
which has existed for a very long interval of time, probably for several 
hundreds of thousands of years, throughout that area of distribution. 
Its natural foodplants, wild grasses, are universally distributed and its 
own distribution has apparently only been limited by the desert areas on 
the North-West, by the colder climate of the Palearctic Region to the 
North, by the Indian Ocean to the South and West, and probably by 
natural barriers to the South-East. It is a species which is frequently 
met with at sea some distance from land, probably carried by off-shore 
winds, as I myself noticed when employed in a Surveying Ship off the 
coast of Ceylon, and at a Meeting of the Entomological Society of London, 
at which I was present in June 1909, there were exhibited several speci- 
mens which had been captured at sea nearly two hundred miles off the 
coast of Cochin China, from which they had apparently been carried by 
the wind. [See “Proceedings of the Entomological Society of London,” 
1909, p. xxxix.] I see no reason why the egg-masses, when laid on 
arasses, should not be transported equally well and carry any egg-parasites 
with them. I have already dealt elsewhere [‘‘ Proceedings of the Ento- 
mological Society, 1909, p. xiv; “ Transactions of the Linnean Society, 
Zool. XIII, 320] with the distribution of insects by the action of cyclonic 
storms in conjunction with the movements of the upper strata of the 
atmosphere, so I need not go into that again. But I mention these 
facts, firstly, to show you that if any effective parasites of Schanobius 
do occur anywhere they are likely to have been distributed already by 
natural causes and, secondly, to impress upon you the necessity of 
looking on this sort of problem in as broad a way as possible. It is 
by the accumulation of scattered facts, each perhaps insignificant in 
itself but gathered from as wide a field as possible, that our knowledge 
is advanced, and I think that such advance will be expedited by the 
centralization of our facts as much as possible. Hf, therefore, any of 
you Provincial workers come across any egg or other parasites of Sch@- 
