72 B. GRASSI AND A. SANDIA8. 



available species, and his own dissections, convince the trans- 

 lator that in the known species of Embiidse — 1, no winged 

 female is known ; 2, the apex of the abdomen is always asym- 

 metrical in the male ; 3, it is never asymmetrical in the 

 female. The number of described species has now reached 

 twenty, of which ten are known by winged males alone, mostly 

 described from single specimens. The only species in which 

 a winged female has been positively asserted to exist is Embia 

 mauritanica. Lucas ^ describes a winged imago and a 

 wingless larva (as large as the imago), and states that he 

 opened the abdomen of several imagos and found them to be 

 females. As his very poor description of the ovaries is abso- 

 lutely irreconcilable with Professor Grassi's, or with the 

 writer's dissections of E. urichi, and as his figure of the 

 winged form has palpably the asymmetry of the abdomen due 

 to the presence of the penis and titillatores, it must be irresis- 

 tibly concluded that he mistook the testes for the ovaries, and 

 that his so-called larvse were presumably the females of the 

 species. Embia persica, McLach., is said to have a winged 

 female, but only very doubtfully. On the other hand, wingless 

 females (which are much rarer in collections than the males) 

 exist in six described species. In Embia solieri the so- 

 called wingless larvse may have included imagos of both sexes, 

 and the species is probably, as Professor Grassi conjectures, 

 the one with which he has dealt. As for the remaining 

 generic characters, the sexual differences of the mandibles can 

 be evaluated only when they have been studied in both sexes 

 of other species ; antennal differences are absolutely fallacious 

 in forms in which the organs vary so excessively in the number 

 of joints, and the only remaining character of any value 

 appears to reside in the neuration which distinguishes the 

 wings of the males in Oligotoma and Embia (with which is 

 included the somewhat different-looking subgenus Olyntha), 

 and in the absence of wings in the males of Professor Grassi's 

 species, Embia solieri, and (apparently) Embia antiqua. 

 But this applies to one sex only, and the writer sees no 

 1 'Explor. Alger.,' iii, pp. Ill— 114 j 'Neur.,' pi. iii, fig. 2, a—n. 



