219 ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS [May, '13 



vation of 8400 feet. The road was good and our speedometer 

 indicated 35 miles an hour on one down grade stretch, with 

 seven passengers and a heavy load of mail, express and bag- 

 gage. Bodie is an old, decayed mining camp with a few hun- 

 dred inhabitants. Next morning a horse stage driven by a 

 Mexican took me to one of my main objective points, Mono 

 Lake, a distance of 22 miles. I stopped at the Mono Lake 

 post-office and secured accommodations for a few days at the 

 combined store, saloon, hotel, blacksmith shop and feed mill 

 of Jack Hammond, about a mile beyond. Here I devoted my 

 first attention to the insects of the lake itself. It is a highly 

 alkaline body of water and contains vast numbers of the larvae 

 of Ephydra hians, used in the pupa stage as food by the In- 

 dians under the name of "koo-tsabe." The specific identity of 

 the fly had not been ascertained prior to my visit. Along the 

 west side of the lake the shores rise abruptly into the Sierras, 

 and there are numbers of rapid streams, large and small. The 

 collecting is superb, and I could have spent more time to good 

 advantage, but my plans limited me to four days. Besides 

 some new species, the following are the more interesting re- 

 sults of my collecting: Bittacomorpha sackeni, Tabanus opa- 

 cus and phaenops, Thereva johnsoni, Tachytrechus olympiae 

 and angustipennis, N othosympycnus vegetus, Psilopodimis pi- 

 licornis, Sympycnus marcidus, Chrysogaster nigrovittata, 

 Clausicella setigera, N otonaulax cincta and Themira putris. 



Mono Lake lies close against the east side of the main 

 Sierras, directly east of Yosemite Park, which comes up to 

 the divide, about 16 miles by trail from the lake. Parties not 

 infrequently come down to the lake from the Park ; in fact it 

 is more visited from that side than from the railroad some 

 65 miles away to the eastward. When I was there the Sierras 

 towering above it were covered with great fields of snow and 

 I never saw a more picturesque view than the one looking 

 down on the lake and across it to the mountains, from the 

 range near Bodie. 



On my return to the railroad I had to stay over night at 

 Thorne, in order to have time to box up some freight for ship- 

 ment. The hotel business mostly goes to Hawthorne, but I 

 felt well repaid for any little inconvenience of my stay in 



