130 Forty-first Report on the State Museum. 



Its Distribution. 



It is a southern form, which seems for some time past to have been 

 steadily extending its way northward. Say, who cites the species in 

 his American Entomology, in 1871, iinder the name of Cermatia coleop- 

 trata, gives it as an inhabitant of the Southern States, which he had 

 observed in Georgia and Florida. The examj^les described by New- 

 port as Cermatia Floridana, were from East Florida, where it was quite 

 common, running about in houses at night. The examples deposited 

 in the Smithsonian Institution at Washington are, according to Dr. 

 Wood, author of the Myriopoda of North America, from Tamaulipas in 

 Mexico, St. Louis, and Washington. 



It first came under my observation in Albany, in the year 1870, in a 

 specimen brought to the N. Y. State Museum of Natural History, 

 which had been taken in this city. It had been observed within the 

 State at an earlier date, for Dr. H. A. Hagen informs me that a living 

 specimen was seen by him in his bed-room at the Prescott House, in 

 New York, in October, 1867 — the first articulate to greet him upon 

 his arrival in America. 



In 1878, Dr. A. S. Packard found an individual hidden in some 

 wrapping paper in his house at Providence, R. I., which he thought 

 may have been brought in a bundle from New Jersey, as it had not, 

 so far as he knew, been known jareviously to exist north of Phila- 

 delphia. Its capture was made the occasion of its notice as "A Poi- 

 sonous Centij)ede," in the American Naturalist for August, 1879. The 

 publication of this notice brought forth a note from Mr. Samuel Hen- 

 shaw, of the Boston Society of Natural History, to the effect that the 

 society's collections contained six examples taken in Massachusetts, 

 and that three others were known to have been captured in other 

 parts of the State. It had also been taken at Milford, in New 

 Hampshire. 



In a recently published paper entitled. The North American Myria- 

 poda, by Prof. L. M. Underwood, * of the Syracuse University, it 

 is given as having been observed by the writer at Bloomington, HI., 

 Philadelj^hia, Pa., Brooklyn, N. Y. (somewhat common in cellars), and 

 at Utica, N. Y. (in a single examj)le, running about the floors of the 

 N. Y. Central Rail Road Station); and as somewhat generally 

 distributed east of the Mississippi river. 



In a Preliminary List of the Myriapoda of Arkansas, by Charles H. 

 Bollman,f it is recorded as occasional in that State ; " one adult was 

 seen at Arkadelphia, and several young at Little Rock." 



* Entomologica Americaiia, i, 1885, pp. 141-151. t Id., iv, 1888, pp. 1-8. 



