126 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 
wings are clouded with darker patches, particularly in the hind 
marginal area. Last year I found a dark female, and obtained a 
fuscata male to pair. A good many of the resulting larvee died, and 
I only reared eighteen examples, which emerged last March. Curiously 
everyone was a female; only four of these were typical. The re- 
mainder were all dark in body and wing; in three examples almost 
uniformly rich dark brown nearly black, but with the lines perceptibly 
blacker, the rest have a somewhat less dark hind marginal area. I 
obtained again a pairing with a wild fuscata male, and have, as a 
result, a batch of eggs.—(Rev.) W. G. WuirrineHam. 
SOCIETIES. 
EnromonoaicaL Society or Lonpon.—Wednesday, March 3rd, 
1909.—Dr. EF. A. Dixey, M.A., M.D., President, in the chair.—Mr. 
Francis Hamilton Lyon, of Addlestone, Surrey, was elected a Fellow 
of the Society.—Mr. L. B. Prout, on behalf of himself and Mr. A. 
Bacot, brought for exhibition a very extensive series of Acidalia 
virguiarva, Hb., bred in ten successive generations from various 
crossings of the London and Hyéres race, which had been under- 
taken with a view to the further study of Mendelism. The results 
showed non-Mendelian inheritance, there being no segregation with 
pure and hybrid forms in definite proportions, thus supporting Mr. 
Bacot’s opinion that such were only to be expected in cases of 
hybridization of forms in which Natural Selection had virtually 
eliminated intermediates. A discussion followed in which Mr. Bacot, 
Dr. T. A. Chapman, Mr. G. Meade-Waldo, and the President took 
part, Mr. A. Harrison pointing out that in similar experiments 
conducted by himself with Mr. H. Main with British Pieris napy x 
P. var. bryome from Switzerland carried through three generations, 
they had quite failed to obtain Mendelian proportions, but in the case 
of Aplecta nebulosa the Mendelian proportions were absolute.—Mr. 
H. M. Edelsten showed a living pupa of Prerzs rape attached to a 
blade of Clivia, the deep green pigment assimilating closely to the 
coloration of the leaf—Mr. R. Adkin exhibited what appeared to be 
a hybrid between Zygena filipendule and Z. achillee, taken by Mr. 
A. W. Renton in the neighbourhood of Oban, N.B.—Mr. J. W. Tutt 
expressed his opinion that the form was an aberration of Z. filipen- 
dul@, and said that in nature the two species were unknown to 
pair.—Mr. Hamilton H. Druce, F.L.8., F.E.S., communicated a 
paper ‘‘On some new and little known Hesperiide from Tropical 
West Africa.”—Mr. G. A. K. Marshall, F.Z.S., read a paper entitled 
“ Birds as a Factor in the production of Mimetic Resemblances in 
Butterflies.’ He explained that one of the chief criticisms directed 
against the theories of mimicry was to the effect that, on the whole, 
birds did not destroy butterflies to any appreciable extent; he had 
therefore collected together all the available evidence bearing on the 
question. It was contended also that the negative evidence on this 
subject, which appeared to have been very generally accepted, was 
really of very little scientific value, because in no case had it been 
shown that the observer had any adequate knowledge of the actual 
