^Fxlviii 



segments in the supposed transitional individuals. Can it be 

 possible that Artemia Miilhausenii may be an imperfectly retarded 

 condition of A. salina, similar to the imperfect state of the great 

 majority of individuals of Lvgseus brevipennis, or Velia rivulorum ? 

 I attach but little weiglit to the partheuogenetic observations in 

 this memoir, as we know perfectly from various English Lepi- 

 doptera that parthenogenesis affords no test of specific distinction. 



In 'Nature' for December 28, 1876, appears an article "On 

 the Relation between Flowers and Insects," translated from the 

 ' Bienen Zeitung,' the author of which assumes that the capacity 

 for gathering honey either for the sustenance of the insect or its 

 progeny is to be regarded as the test of the evolutionary process 

 employed in the development of these insects ; the author 

 remarking that " the habit possessed by our hone3'--bee of feeding 

 itself from flowers, and its corresponding faculty of deciding 

 amongst different species and divining the situation of the honey, 

 is, in the first instance, derived from the common parents of all 

 the. Hymenoptera. It probably even comes from such remote 

 ancestors as the leaf-cutting wasp {sic)* from thence passes to 

 the gall-flies, the Ichneumons, and the hunting wasps, from 

 which latter it goes to the allied species of ants and bees." This 

 extraordinary series of assumptions is founded upon a set of 

 tables showing the number of visits paid to flowers in which the 

 honey is apparent, partially apparent, concealed but easily 

 reached by a short or by a long proboscis or not reachable, or 

 which are only furnished with pollen, commencing with Tenthredo 

 and ending with " Bombus apis " (sic). Even supposing these 

 various tables w^ere correct, I feel called on to insist that they 

 would afford no proof at all that a bee is a more fully developed 

 creature than a Tenthredo, or that a bee which makes waxen 

 hexagonal cells furnished with honey has been developed out of a 

 wasp which makes paper hexagonal cells furnished with animal 

 food ; or that a Bombus which makes individual egg-shaped 

 waxen cells provisioned with honey must be regarded as the 

 forerunner of the hexagonal cell-making honej'-bee. 



A memoir of considerable extent on the markings of caterpillars 

 at different stages of their growth (that is, after successive 

 changes of the skin) appears as the chief article in the second 



* Throughout the aiticle the leaf-cuttiug Hymenoptera are ignorantly miscalled 

 leaf-cutting wasps. 



