28 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 



me they will be henceforth T. crepuscularia. Other opinions 

 shall have my respect, as in duty bound, — " I bend my back and 

 bow my head," as they sing in ' Dorothy.' 



I will not weary the reader, or trespass upon the indulgence 

 of our editor, by appending a copy of a table which lies before me, 

 showing dates of hatching, pupation, or emergence of the various 

 Tephrosias committed to my charge. I will rather summarise, 

 and the general conclusion I arrive at is this : if these Tephrosias 

 appear early enough to lay eggs which hatch in March, April, or 

 even as late as the first few days of May, the climatic conditions, 

 local environment, and acquired habit may permit a second, 

 third, and, I should not be surprised, a fourth brood of imagines. 

 On the other hand, if they appear so late that the eggs do not 

 hatch before the end of May or beginning of June, there will, as 

 a rule, be only one brood. A second emergence of York 

 biundularia was represented by a male of " bone-white " ground 

 colour on Sept. 8th, while those of Delamere Forest showed a 

 male of the local type on Aug. 19th, and a female at the end of 

 November, the larvae being reared and the pupae kept behind a 

 high wall facing north, in the open. And who shall say that the 

 six moths I took, June 13th, 1891, in Delamere Forest, were not 

 representatives of a second brood ! They were fresh insects, and 

 I obtained eggs from them (Entom. xxiv. 287). Surely here is 

 evidence of a common trait or character ! Anyhow, no one 

 would think of separating moths into species because here there 

 is only one brood in the season, and there two ; if so then the 

 Plusia festucce of Bolton (Entom. xxix. 113) is a different species 

 to the Plusia festucce of Chester. Again, second and third brood 

 imagines (bred) of crepuscularia (bistortata) were fewer at Chester 

 than, for example, in Somerset and Hants ; that is, as they 

 became exposed to colder conditions and less favourable environ- 

 ment. Somerset gave me, without extenuating circumstances, a 

 second brood of five moths from three dozen larvae ; Hants, a 

 third brood of nine from one hundred and forty-four larvae ; the 

 rest of the pupae are, in each case, lying over the winter. It was 

 in this attempt to arrive at general conclusions that I met my 

 greatest difficulty. I could not fit a communication from a valued 

 correspondent into the chain of evidence. At last, on comparing 

 the date with the postmarks, I found him, accidentally of 

 course, two months out ! 



The concluding part of my inquiry into the two Tephrosias 

 deals with matters entirely microscopic. It is without weight 

 either for or against identity ; the value of x equals nothing ! 

 But, to naturalists, anything under the microscope is so enchant- 

 ing that " we lose and forget the creeping hours of time." Such 

 must be the excuse for presenting my experience to the reader. 

 Dr. Beale, in his 'How to work with the Microscope,' p. 29, 

 says : — " The best light during the day is to be obtained from a 



