uno 



THE NATaRALlST. 



Unio margartifera. — Referring to 

 Mr. Dixon's remarks on this Shell 

 being found in the Black Eiver, 

 Douglas, Isle of Man, at page 81 of 

 " The Naturalist," allow me to say, 

 that, we have them in large quanti- 

 ties at Braystones, on the Irt, a 

 tributary of the Calder, where I 

 have frequently seen them protrud- 

 ing their short sii)hons out of the 

 mud on a hot sunny day. Tradition 

 says that these shells were intro- 

 duced here by one of the former 

 owners, Sir John Hawkins, who had 

 a jpatent for fishing them ; and the 

 same story is told by Montague in 

 his history of British Shells. — L. M. 

 PiiAiTEN, Whitehaven. 



Field-Dats near Scarborough. 

 No. I. 

 Oct. 1st, 1864.— Our first field- 

 day was spent in the Forge Valley 

 — a glen of the calcareous range — 

 about five miles from Scarborough. 

 My companions were an enthusiastic 

 fern-grower, whose name so often 

 appears in Moore's "Nature-printed 

 Ferns," and a Micro-lepidopterist, 

 who has been so successful in rear- 

 ing those minute forms of insect 

 life, that he has attained to conti* 

 nental celebrity ! 



We started early, and drove to 

 the scene of our operations. Our 

 first discovery was Nepticula prune- 

 torum, busily mining the leaves of the 

 sloe. The concentric zones in the 



brown blotch are sufficiently charac- 

 teristic of this species. The sloe- 

 leaves had also fed another Nepticula 

 [Plagicolella), the large whitish 

 blotches giving ample evidence 

 thereof. Lithocolletis Coryli next put 

 in an appearance, mining in the 

 upper side of hazel leaves. We 

 soon came upon a large batch 'of 

 Berheris aquifolium, whose purple 

 berries and shade of foliage are 

 eagerly sought by the pheasants on 

 Lord Londesborough's preserves. 

 Our own British Berheris, with its 

 clusters of scarlet fruit, grows ap- 

 parently wild in the valley. Hyperi- 

 cum hirsutum, the commonest species 

 of the calcareous glens and dales, 

 gave us another miner, Nepticula 

 Septembrella. Fine black-berried 

 shrubs of the Buckthorn (Rhamnus 

 catharticus) were next examined, and 

 the broad galleries of Nepticula 

 catharticella were evident in the 

 leaves. Actcsa spicata one of the 

 Ranunculaceae with deep black 

 drupes, is very common in the 

 Forge. A grass, not uncommon to 

 this neighbourhood, [Brachypodium 

 sylvaticum) was feeding within its fine 

 leaves the larva of Elachista Tccnia- 

 tella. Forge Valley is the home of 

 the Wood Vetch which here as- 

 sumes fine proportions : it was seed- 

 ing profusely. The leaves of a rare 

 orchid [Epipactis ensifolia) were 

 pointed out by one of our party. 

 The Brambling Finch, a native of 



