COLLECTING FUNGUS-GNATS. 83 



body, its sheaths black. Hind coxio basaliy punctate, the remainder, 

 trans-striate, femora bidentate, tibite compressed to beyond middle. 

 "Wings hyaline. 



Black ; head beneath, inner orbits and frons flavous ; the upper 

 margin of the colour is trilobed, the central narrow streak extending 

 to the top of the lower tubercle, the outer lobes triangular ; antennae 

 basaliy rufo-testaceous, posterior metatarsi white. 



Length 11 mm. ; abdomen 7 mm. ; petiole 3 mm. ; terebra Hi mm. 



£ra6.— Hoabinh, Tonkin, August, 1918 (E. V. de Salvaza). ' 



Differs from 1). trilincatus, Elliott, in the shorter second 

 flagellar joint, the sculpture of the mesonotum and mesopleurae, 

 the absence of the white band on the terebra and the colour of 

 the face. In D. trilineatns and simillimus two descending rufe- 

 scent streaks divide the space between the eyes into five strips 

 of colour of about equal breadth, and the lower tubercle is 

 entirely black ; in the present species the outer streaks are 

 broadly triangular and the flavous colour extends to the top 

 of the lower tubercle. The three species are undoubtedly very 

 closely related. 



41, Chapel Park Road, 



St. Leonard's-on-Sea ; 



December 29«/(, 1919. 



COLLECTING FUNGUS-GNATS. 

 By Claude Morley, F.Z.S., etc. 



The best means of gauging the progress made in British 

 entomology is a comparison of the present status of any given 

 group with that it occupied at some definite former period. As 

 a very small chap I had a great ambition, as most kiddies have, 

 to know the name of everything I saw, and was most annoyed 

 with my nursery governess because she would persist in calling 

 a tiny thing one could hardly see but was most obviously circular 

 " a beetle," and great fat things half the size of one's finger 

 and of the same shape, "a beetle." They could not both be 

 beetles, I maintained, because she herself had to admit they were 

 different ! But I had no knowledge in those pristine days of 

 how little the greybeards themselves knew of such matters, or 

 what the hiatus valde dejiendus would be ere one came to 

 discover the name of each of these and other insects. This 

 was 'way back in the seventies, in the days of woolly-bears and 

 wood-lice, and now, forty years later, some progress really is 

 apparent. It is slow, disappointingly slow, which we must lay 

 at the door of spasmodicity. All, or nearly all progress is owing 

 to individual effort, which is to say that a man becomes obsessed 

 by an enthusiasm for a certain group, and works like a Trojan, 



