342 LEPIDOPTERA. 



with broader stripes of brownisli-grey clouding, in which are 

 a few black spots, one or two each on the middle segments ; 

 subdorsal and spiracular lines dusky brownish-grey ; spiracles 

 black ; under surface and feet dirty pale grey ; plate on the 

 second segment barred or spotted with black. Sometimes 

 the ground colour is wholly dirty reddish, with reddish-grey 

 stripes deeper in tint. Very similar to that of A. valligcTct'in 

 colour and markings. 



September to May or June on Cerastium and other chick- 

 weeds, Spergula nodosa, Galijim vcruvi, G. mollugo, and probably 

 almost any low-growing plants, especially those attached to 

 sandy soils. Hiding, like its congeners, under the surface of 

 the sand, or of the earth, in the daytime, but coming out at 

 night to feed. On the Continent it is one of the species 

 notorious for their destructiveness to crops. Kollar, in his 

 treatise on injurious insects, quotes a paper by Count Berol- 

 dingen, in the Transactions of the Imperial Agricultural 

 Society of Vienna, upon its devastations on his own estate, in 

 the year 1835. " The buckwheat (Polyijonum fagopynivi) 

 is only cultivated in sandy unmanured soils, as a summer 

 crop, where oats and barley do not succeed, in the middle of 

 the month of June of the second year of the three years rota- 

 tion of crops. In the beginning of July, when the buckwheat 

 had attained the height of six inches, bare spots appeared 

 suddenly in the middle of the fields, which from day to day 

 became larger and more numerous. On a close examination 

 of these spots a dark grey, partly brownish, caterpillar was 

 found some inches deep in the earth ; it was from one to 

 one and a half inches long, and its thickness was that of a 

 small quill. This creature, after feeding at night or early in 

 the morning on the delicate shoots of the luxuriant buck- 

 wheat, passes the rest of the day in repose, or perhaps in 

 gnawing the roots of the plants, in darkness, in the earth. 

 The devastations of these insects proceeded so rapidly that, 

 within a week, more than half of the buckwheat fields were 

 so comj^Ietely devoured that neither leaf, stem, nor root of 



