A CHAPTER ON ZYG^NA MINOS. 59 



ZygcencBy and had formerly suspected that out of Z. Minos 

 probably two species might be established. His former 

 suspicious in reference to this separation, which he had com- 

 municated to Professor Hering of Stettin, become somewhat 

 unsettled in the above treatise, so that it now seems rather 

 doubtful whether he would maintain or not his previously 

 determined separation of this one species into two. 



Professor Hering had already inquired of me whether 

 Z. Minos should not be divided into two species, since he 

 found the larvte quite different from those figured in my 

 plate 86, namely, ivhite and whitish-blue^ instead of yellow. 

 I have carefully examined the specimens of the imago sent 

 by him, but after all my investigations I could find no suffi- 

 cient distinctions , between them and the specimens which I 

 take here. Only in some specimens of Minus I find the 

 securiform spot, in which the red middle stripe terminates, 

 somewhat broader, larger, and more lost in the ground- 

 colour. 



When I gave my figure of 3Iinos on plate 86, I had 

 always found the larvae yellow and no other colour. How- 

 ever, last summer, on the 25th May, 1843, I chanced by 

 accident to find, in a meadow near a wood, a number of the 

 white larvae of Zt/gcena Minos, which is very like Hiibner's 

 figure, and at the very same place, amongst them, sows 

 yellow larvae. They ate very properly only Pimpinella, 

 but they also bit other plants, such as thyme, &c. Of these 

 larvae, which, when I found them, were just full grown, 

 I collected considerably over a hundred, amongst them from 

 17 to 20 of the yellorv ones, which were also rather larger. 

 I immediately separated them, and kept the white larvae and 

 the yellow larvae in separate cages. But unfortunately many, 

 indeed most, of the larvae were infested with Ichneumons or 

 Gordii, so that in proportion to my stock of larvae I ob- 

 tained only a few perfect insects, which showed no further 



