BY T. H. JOHNSTON AND M. J. BANCROFT. 201 
lissima, but the arista is slightly different, the terminal 
fourth not being feathered. He states that it resembles 
the house fly in general appearance, but the male has a 
yellow abdomen, with very distinct black longitudinal 
stripe, and the female a chequered abdomen. 
Acknowledgments :—We desire to express our indeb- 
tedness to Dr. E. W. Ferguson, Health Department, Sydney ; 
Mr. Gerald Hill, F.E.S., Institute of Tropical Medicine ; 
and Mr. W. A. Rainbow, Librarian of the Australian Museum, 
Sydney, for their kindness in transcribing and forwarding 
literature. 
ADDENDUM. 
‘We have been informed recently by Dr. E. W. Fergu- 
son, who is a worker in Australian dipterology, that 
Macquart’s specific name M. australis is preoccupied by 
M. australis Boisduval (Voyage de |’ Astrolabe, 2, 1835, 
p. 669) given to a quite different muscid. The name then 
cannot stand. Macquart’s short account of the female 
was based on specimens from the Solomon and Fiji Islands, 
and that of the male on flies from Tasmania and Fiji. 
His description is very short and might include 
M. vetustissima also, except for the *‘ quadrivittate thorax.”’ 
The * black tessellated abdomen” is more characteristic 
of the latter species than it is of M. australis. We should 
not be surprised if more than one species be included in the 
scanty account. We therefore propose to name _ that 
species which occurs in Queensland as WM. fergusoni n.sp. 
Should the fly from Fiji and the Solomons be shown on 
re-examination to be specifically identical with the 
Queensland forms, the name will still stand owing to Mac- 
quart’s use of a preoccupied specific name, but if found 
to be different then a new name must be given to the 
Pacific species. Macquart’s Tasmanian forms are pro- 
bably MW. vetustissima. We might mention that Mr. E. 
Austen, of the British Museum, identified some of our 
Hidsvold specimens as M. australis Macq. 
Our creation of a new species rather than the renaming 
of the old species seems to be the most satisfactory method 
of dealing with the difficulty so that the synonymy in view 
of our present knowledge might be indicated thus, M. 
