102 



PSYCHE. 



[June 1S91 



and the other in the lower White River, where 

 at two different localities forty miles apart 

 Denton had many years ago brought home a 

 small collection of fossil insects of presum- 

 ably the same age as those at Florissant. In 

 both of these places the party was very 

 successful. The journey had to be made in 

 a wagon and the search among the rocks on 

 foot or on horseback, and as the greater part 

 of the time had to be given up to the attempt 

 to discover which beds contained fossil in- 

 sects, very little was left for the exploitation 

 of the same; for the beds in which insects 

 were found covered an area of hundreds of 

 square miles, and in a vertical series ranging 

 from five hundred to fifteen hundred feet, in 

 nearly all of which some remains were found 

 but in certain localities, especially at the ex- 

 treme upper beds, in such abundance as to 

 warrant the belief that each of these localities 

 may be richer than that of Florissant, hither- 

 to believed to be the richest in the world: 

 Subsequent visits were made to Green River, 

 Wvo. , where the pocket in which all speci- 

 mens had hitherto been found had been en- 

 tirely worked away, and his efforts were direc- 

 ted to the discovery of some new location in 

 the immediate vicinity ; in this he was suc- 

 cessful, and was able to obtain several hun- 

 dred specimens; at Fossil in the same terri- 

 tory, insects were found to occur so rarely as 

 not to warrant a search for them, and at 

 Amethyst Mt., in the Yellowstone Park, no 

 strata sufficiently fine in which to preserve 

 the remains of fossil insects were found in 

 those beds which have yielded the leaves of 

 plants. 



Mr. Scudder then showed specimens of 

 some of the fossil Diptera brought from Col- 

 orado. He said that the same species of lar- 

 vae had been found throughout five hundred 

 vertical feet of strata. 



Dr. H. A. Hagen remarked on Dr. Pack- 

 ard's article in Psyche on the epipharynx of 

 insects which he considers very important. 

 He said that European white ants had been 

 introduced into Panama. 



Mr. S. H. Scudder remarked on the scarcitv 



of butterflies and in fact of all insects in the 

 Yellowstone Park, and indeed throughout all 

 the west during the past summer. 



Mr. H. Hinkley said that he had investi- 

 gated whether the milk-weed butterfly hiber- 

 nates or not and came to the conclusion that 

 it does not. 



Mr. Scudder said that he had found it very 

 difficult to make butterflies which hibernate 

 in nature do so in confinement, so that he 

 does not place much faith in negative evidence 

 from artificial experimentation. 



Mr. Hinkley said that a fungus disease very 

 like muscardine has attacked the larvae of A. 

 fromethea during the past summer. He said 

 that he had raised a true second brood of 

 this species, and had reared large numbers 

 of other Bombycidae in close proximity to 

 his prometheas and none were affected. 



8 November, 1889. — The 149th meeting of 

 the Club was held at 156 Brattle St., the 

 president in the chair. 



Dr. H. A. Hagen in commenting upon an 

 article on the gipsey moth (Ocneria dispar~) 

 in the Boston Transcript for 31 October, 1SS9 

 said that he remembered the fact of the acci- 

 dental introduction of the species by Mr. L. 

 Trouvelot some twenty years ago. Judging 

 from his experience with the species in Eu- 

 rope, Dr. Hagen doubted the necessity for 

 legislative acts and appropriations in order 

 to suppress its ravages. 



Mr. S. H. Scudder exhibited a fossil trilo- 

 bite which showed a remarkable resemblance 

 to a scarabaeid-beetle (Phanaeus), also a 

 new species of fossil butterfly (Barbarotkea 

 florissanti) from Florissant, Col. This butter- 

 fly is the second of the Libytheinae found at 

 Florissant, and is most closely related to the 

 European species; the other {Prolibythea 

 vagabnnda) is most nearly allied to the 

 species from West Africa. Of the known 

 fossil butterflies one ninth are Libytheinae ; 

 of living species one eight-hundredth belong 

 to the same family. 



Mr. Scudder also exhibited a photograph 

 of a suffused melanic male of Papilio turnus 

 sent by Mr. James Fletcher of Ottawa. 



