382 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 
been purely fanciful up to the date of Guenée’s great work, 
and entirely independent of that affinity, which such asso- 
ciations were originally intended to indicate. — Edward 
Newman. 
Life-history of Aleucis pictarta.—The moth, which so long 
eluded the grasp of our most ardent, most practised, and most 
skilful collectors, makes its appearance in the winged state 
during that fearful time which poets denominate “balmy ” 
and “gentle,” which they apostrophise as “ethereal mild- 
ness,” and which they tell us “comes veiled in a shower of 
shadowing roses,” while “ sportive zephyrs play”; but which 
our prosaic ancestors curtly designated “ blackthorn winter,” 
and which we ourselves dread as the season when east winds 
hold their revels, sowing catarrh, bronchitis, consumption and 
all manner of dire diseases broadcast over the land. It is 
then that the sloe puts forth its bloom, assuming a whiteness 
undistinguishable, in the blinding drifting atmosphere of 
snow, from the flakes which are perpetually alighting on the 
blackened twigs for an instant and then hurrying forward on 
their horizontal career. It is then that Pictaria, having passed 
the winter in the pupa state on the surface of the earth, 
emerges from its self-selected grave, and, mounting upwards, 
crawls along the twigs with dainty steps, miraculously 
maintaining its foot-hold and balancing itself with its scarcely 
stiffened wings; it is then that it performs its hymeneal rites 
and procreative duties: incongruous choice! strange antithesis 
to the howling elements around! It is then that our 
collectors, undeterred by the surroundings, sally forth with 
candle and lanthorn, like Diogenes of old, seeking Pictaria 
with numbed fingers and purple noses. The eggs are laid on 
the blackthorn and abandoned to Nature, careful and saga- 
cious Nurse, while the parents are hastened to destruction 
and battered to pieces by the fury of the blast. Of the infant 
larva we know but little, but when a fortnight old it may be 
beaten into the collecting-net or the umbrella from the 
dwarf blackthorns either at Dartford Heath or at Loughton, 
or in the New Forest, and a fortnight later we find it full grown 
and resting in a bent position on the twigs of the blackthorn, 
which it so closely resembles that I deem it next to impossible 
to distinguish one from the other when the larva is motion- 
less: the head is slightly narrower than the 2nd segment, its 
