NOTES ON THE WAVE MOTHS. 9 



Eois, Meyr.), in which genus, indeed, Meyrick places it. But 

 his genus rests on imaginal characters alone, amongst the chief 

 of which is, " posterior tibiae in male .... without spurs " ; 

 whereas those of rusticata most emphatically have the terminal 

 spurs, and well developed. This circumstance has led Herrich- 

 Schaeffer to place it in the genus which Meyrick calls Sterrha, 

 along with ochrata, &c. 



I am afraid I shall have wearied you already with these 

 intricacies of the imaginal classification, but I thought it almost 

 necessary to state how matters stood in that regard, in order to 

 be able to compare one or two of the results arrived at with those 

 obtainable from the earlier stages, which have been, in this 

 group, too much neglected from the systematist's point of view, 

 but which I am hoping to take in hand as opportunity offers ; 

 and concerning which I want to show that I have already 

 made a commencement. To be sure, I cannot claim to have 

 yet discovered anything novel, and the peculiar hair- structures 

 of certain of the larvae have been mentioned in a haphazard 

 way by different writers, as have also the extreme differences in 

 the relative length and thickness in various members of the 

 group ; but, so far as I am aware, no attempt at all has been 

 made to correlate the imaginal genera with the larval. This, no 

 doubt, arises from the fact that our genus-makers are chiefly 

 museum-workers, who know nothing, and care less, about the 

 earlier stages ; for instance, the celebrated Dutch entomologist, 

 Heer P. C. T. Snellen, who not so long ago remarked, very 

 inaptly, that it seemed to him that the classifying of insects by 

 any other than the perfect state was very much like classifying 

 men and women by the shape of the cap which their grand- 

 mothers wore ! Surely the nearest approach which can be made 

 to a perfect classificatory system will be made by those who — 

 like Mr. Tutt and his collaborators in his great work, ' British 

 Lepidoptera ' — endeavour to take due account of all stages, and 

 all characters, of course with an adequate recognition of their 

 probable relative antiquity and stability, and so forth, under 

 the stress of the manifold operations of natural selection. 



In speaking of the larvae of " Acidalia," let me first mention 

 some peculiarities of habit, &c, which are more or less distinc- 

 tive of them, and which may readily attract the attention of even 

 the casual observer. I do not quite know how best to arrange 

 these scattered observations ; but perhaps the following will 

 satisfactorily cover the ground, viz. : when they are found ; where 

 they are found; how they feed; hoiv they are protected. In one 

 sense, at least so far as my own experience is concerned, the first 

 two might almost be disposed of in single words — "nowhen" 

 and " nowhere." During a period of some eighteen years as a 

 more or less active field-lepidopterist, I have only on four occa- 

 sions, to my recollection, found an " Acidalia" larva, and in each 



