ARCTIID^. 279 



almost always having a tinge of colour from creamy to 

 faintly brownish or being softly clouded with brown or 

 greyish, but never approaching to the typical form. 

 Another race has been found in Yorkshire and more particu- 

 larly in the neighbourhood of Huddersfield, and has been 

 continued in repeated broods by Mr. G. T. Porritt, having 

 the males of a deep sooty black, with blacker blotches or 

 spots, and a row of small blotches on the hind wings ; and 

 the females strongly ornamented with an increased number 

 of black dots, the ordinary spots also enlarged into cloudy 

 blotches and the whole showing a strong tendency, in both 

 sexes, to form themselves into the first and second transverse 

 lines, common to so many species, or into cloudy bands, while 

 some specimens are also strongly clouded with blackish 

 towards the hind margin. These, however, are extreme 

 variations ; with them are many normal and intermediate 

 specimens. A form intermediate between the type and 

 the var. rustica has been reared by Mr. R. Adkin by 

 crossing. A pretty variety of the female is obtained in 

 Oxfordshire by Mr. A Sidgwick, in which the usual costal 

 dots have become perfectly round spots, larger in size, united 

 by a black line, and placed at accurately regular intervals. 

 Mr. S. Webb has a female specimen with numerous large 

 roundish marginal grey spots; others thickly scaled and 

 with smoky margins ; and one which has but a single black 

 dot on each fore wing. Mr. 0. A. Briggs has also a single- 

 dotted female, but its fore wings have the costa smoky black, 

 broadly so at the base ; and a male, originally in Mr. B. 

 Cooke's collection, of a white colour, but with the black dots 

 as sharply marked as in the female. From a larva found 

 near Durham Mr. J. Gardner has reared a greyish-white 

 male of quite a different tone of colour from the var. 

 rustica. Mr. J. E. Robson has a female from the same 

 district having the fore wings clouded with pale brown 

 and the black spots reduced in number to two upon the 

 median nervure; its fore wings are moreover very broad 



