174 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 



articulations of the legs. He brought them immediately to me, 

 and we placed them in a dry phial-bottle, with a few Aphides for 

 food, and tied a piece of muslin over its mouth. The spider soon 

 made a web in which the Aphides became entangled, and thus 

 they remained for the rest of the day without any material change, 

 except that at one time the larva had neai-ly emptied the body of 

 the spider, and had himself become green ; but this was only a 

 temporary change, for shortly after he resumed his original 

 opaque-white hue. On the following morning he had spun 

 himself up in a long narrow orange cocoon, attached to the web 

 of the spider, and had changed into a pupa ; while all that 

 remained of his unfortunate companion was a shrivelled skin 

 lying at the bottom of the bottle. On July 14th the imago 

 emerged from the cocoon in the shape of the Ichneumon which I 

 now send, together with the aforesaid cocoon and the mortal 

 remains of the spider. 1 am unacquainted with spiders, but 

 suppose this species to have belonged to the Epeir'ulcB ; its head 

 and thorax were pale yellow, with pink shading, and its abdomen 

 brilliant pea-green." The Ichneumon is nearest to Polysphincta 

 imllipes, Holmgr., but does not exactly agree with Holmgren's 

 descrii^tion of that species ; whether it is a variety of this or a 

 new species must be left for further consideration. Its oat- 

 shaped cocoon, which is ochreous in colour and quite opaque, is 

 figured to the left in the woodcut. The spider is probably Epeira 

 cucurhitina, Clerck. 



Mr. G. C. Bignell, of Stonehouse, writes: — ^'Polysphincta 

 tuherosa, Grav., bred from a greenish coloured spider beaten out 

 of oak on the 22nd May, 1882 : it is an external parasite, and the 

 larva is too curious a looking little fellow to be allowed to pass 

 unnoticed. When the spider was first beaten out, I asked the 

 gentleman who saw it what it looked like ; he replied, ' It is very 

 much like a miller's man carrying a sack of flour'; to which I 

 quite agreed, for it was laying sack-like across its back ; it was 

 full fed by the 24th. On the 23rd I had a good look at it, and 

 made a sketch ; it had no legs, but in place of them it had 

 sucking-discs, two on the 2nd segment and four on the 3rd and 

 4th, six of them occupying the usual place of the legs ; the other 

 four were half covered with the skin-fold usually seen on lepi- 

 dopterous larvse ; on its back it had eight tubercles, the first on 

 the 4th, the others on the seven following segments; each 

 tubercle was surmounted with two rings of booklets, with three or 



