BRITISH ORTHOPTERA IN 1916. 137 



L. minor were to be seen. If not exactly the commonest insect 

 in those parts, he thought it certainly was one of them. Had 

 he had collecting materials he could have obtained for me a 

 hundred or two without wasting much time. Mr. Whittaker 

 had not then seen any about Newmarket itself. 



A female of this same species, taken near Brockenhurst 

 on September 7th, 1916, was given me by Mr. D. Sharp ; and 

 in November Mr. J. R. le B. Tomlin sent me six males and six 

 females taken in his garden at Reading in September. 



In April, 1916, Mr. H. Moore had brought to him by a 

 friend a male, a female, and half a dozen nymphs of Prolabia 

 arachidis, Yers. They had been taken alive in a City warehouse 

 in bales of goods (rush-baskets) from Japan. Later in the year 

 Mr. Tomlin sent me several examples of the same species from 

 bone refuse at some bone works, Action Bridge. These were 

 collected on October 9th, 1916. The number of instances of 

 the occurrence in England of this cosmopolitan species seems 

 to be increasing. 



Mr. C. W. Bracken, in working out the " Orthoptera of 

 Devon " * took the opportunity of investigating the mystery, as 

 Burr termed it, of the occurrence of Anisolahis annuliyes, Luc. at 

 a bakehouse in Tavistock — a small market-town fourteen miles 

 inland from Plymouth. It appears that some years before 1894, 

 when Mr. Swale first found the earwigs, the father-in-law of 

 the occupant of the bakehouse was a Jamaica merchant, who, 

 visiting his daughter, brought the insects in his luggage. They 

 formed a colony in the bakehouse just behind the house. 



Writing on March 18th, 1916, Mr. 0. Whittaker sent me 

 from the camp at Newmarket another earwig note. It appears 

 that the orderly room in which he was working consisted of 

 a canvas tent supported by a longitudinal ridge-pole resting 

 on three upright posts. Every day Forficula auricularia, Linn., 

 sought refuge up by the ridge-pole, where they must have been 

 in thousands. From this elevation they used in the day-time 

 to drop excreta. Out of curiosity he one morning placed a 

 piece of paper on a table directly beneath the ridge-pole. It 

 was left for an hour, and, when counted, the number of spots 

 of excreta was found to be "three score and eleven." This 

 experiment was performed about the end of June or beginning 

 of July; but F. auricularia swarmed there all through the 

 summer. In the morning he would find five or six in his 

 rifle-breech and as many in the barrel. He did not take a 

 census of males and females, though the circumstances would 

 have afforded an excellent opportunity for so doing. One 

 morning he killed over 100 in one tent without making an 

 appreciable effect on their numbers. There were about 100 



* For a paper on the " Orthoptera of Devon," read on July 20th, 1916, to the 

 Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Sci., Lit., and Art. 



BNTOM. — JUNB, 1917. M 



