THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 279 



the pupa seemed uninjured, I placed it in a box by itself, 

 and on the 24th of April a fine male specimen of Amphy- 

 dasis betularia emerged from it. — Bernard Hartley ; Park 

 View, Ponlefract, May 20, 1869. 



Cirrhaedia xerampeliua. — 1 have this spring taken forty- 

 one larvae of this species from the trunks of ash-trees in my 

 fields and in the immediate neighbourhood, and I believe 

 they have all fed up and are now in the pupal state, as I 

 kept the larvae in glass jars, and can see two or three pupa; 

 under the moss near the glass. I have for several years past 

 searched carefully for the larvae of this insect, but have never 

 before been successful in meeting with it. — Id. 



Mosquitoes in England. — If we get a continuation of this 

 fine sunny weather, ] have no doubt the daily papers, as well 

 as some other periodicals, will be inundated with letters on 

 " mosquito flight" or " mosquito bite," as they were last year 

 when 1 was in the " land o' sketers," as they say across the 

 Atlantic. In the summer of 1866 I was on a visit to the 

 Rev. C. J. S. Belhune, of Cobourg, Upper Canada, who is a 

 capital entomologist, and Secretary of the Canadian Ento- 

 mological Society, and we both came to the conclusion that 

 the "• dreaded mosquito" was none other than the Culex 

 pipiens of our own marshes. Some of your readers may 

 perhaps laugh at this, and, as far as my own opinion is con- 

 cerned as an authority, they have quite a right to do so, as I 

 do not even pretend to scientific knowledge in Entomology ; 

 but Mr. Belhune has, I believe, compared English and 

 American specimens, and could find very little, if any, dif- 

 ferences. Many a time, when flapper-shooting in the marshes 

 in Berkshire, have I been bitten by gnats, which at the time 

 I took to be C. pipiens, — at least they appeared to agree with 

 descriptions of that insect ; and although not in "countless 

 thousands," as they are in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and 

 some other places I have visited, they were sufficiently abun- 

 dant to be very annoying, especially in the dusk of the evening 

 or at early morning. However wrong we may have been in 

 giving both or either insect the specific name of pipiens, one 

 thing is satisfactorily determined, that both the common gnat 

 and the true American mosquito belong to the genus Culex, 

 and that they resemble each other very much. — Henry 

 Reeks; Thrnxton, May 3, 1869. 



