J 



PSYCHE. 



ORGAN OF THE CAMBRIDGE ENTOMOLOGICAL CLUB 

 EDITED BY B. PICKMAN MANN. 



Vol. L] Cambridge, Mass., April, 1876. [No. 24. 



Lixus rubellus Randall. 



About three years ago a dam was built across a little brook 

 in Tyngsboro, Mass., draining a long stretch of meadow land 

 into the Merrimack River, to create a supply of water for 

 mechanical uses. An area of about fifteen acres was thus 

 overflowed. During the past summer I observed sheets of the 

 purple bloom of some plant, then unknown to me, growing 

 above the surface of this water, and one genial day in the mid- 

 dle of last September, as my brother and I were paddling 

 slowly up the pond, examining the floating lily pads, with their 

 very numerous population of Galeruca sagittariae, young and 

 adult, our boat was directed towards the water weed, whose 

 flowers had attracted our attention, when we began to find the 

 subjects of this notice, numerous pale brown beetles with pro- 

 longed and deeply notched apices, clinging to the thick spikes 

 or flower heads, sometimes two upon a single head, but usually 

 singly, and often upon the floating leaves and partly submerged. 

 Nearly all of the three dozen specimens obtained seemed quite 

 mature, the few exceptions being soft and a little paler than the 

 others. They made little or no effort to escape, perhaps occa- 

 sionally shrinking back a little, when towards the most distant 

 side of the spike, on the approach of the hand. In one or two 

 instances an individual was seen to fly a short distance, one 

 alighting on our boat. 



At a subsequent visit, after the pond had been once cov- 

 ered with a thin sheet of ice, which had afterwards melted, a 

 single specimen was found, still clinging to a blackened flower 

 head lifted slightly above the water. And I would say here, 

 for the benefit of those unfamiliar, as I was, with the Polygo- 



