used in mounting the picture ; and that the destruction of the Daguerreotype was in 

 no way referrible to the Acari. 



It appeared, however, from the reading of a long correspondence between Mr. Fe- 

 davb and Mr. Tapping;, that the picture was mounted in a tin tray, and that the plate 

 and glass were so tightly pressed together that the edge of a pen-knife could not be 

 inserted between them, that the whole was in a morocco case with silk lining, and 

 there was no paste, glue or cement used in the mounting. 



Destruction of growing Corn by Dipterous Larvce. 



Mr. Westwood said the Society had received from Mi*. Bolting, of Poynings, 

 Hurstpierpoint, Sussex, some larvae, accompanied by a letter stating that they existed 

 in the fields in that neighbourhood in vast numbers, destroying the growing corn to a 

 great extent, and enquiring how they might be exterminated. The larvse appeared to 

 be those of a Tipula in a young state, and they would consequently continue to feed 

 for some months, so that there was little chance of any side shoots being left: but he 

 was unwilling to advise that the crop should be merely ploughed up, for as the larvae 

 were so numerous they would not be much thinned by birds, and a second sowing 

 would have but a poor chance of succeeding. He had recently been consulted 

 respecting some corn crops destroyed by the larvae of a Muscideous fly, probably 

 Oscinis vastator, and had advised his correspondent to have the ground turned up and 

 burnt, and he would recommend a similar course in the present instance. 



Read the following note by Mr. Newman : — 



On the Parturition of Dorthesia Characias. 



"'The smallest contribution thankfully received.' So says every true lover of 

 insect economy : it matters not a straw to him that some one says the subject has been 

 exhausted years and years ago ; he still keeps on prying into Nature's secrets, poking 

 his nose into holes and corners, noting with his own eyes and jotting down in his own 

 manner those little domestic scenes which are sure to reveal themselves to every one 

 who is master of that most simple, most commonplace, but most valuable accomplish- 

 ment 'how to observe.' Our Secretary gave me, one day last June, a lady specimen 

 of Dorthesia Characias : she was evidently in that interesting stale in which it is said 

 'all ladies wish to be who love iheir lords.' She was confined in a pill-box, without 

 provender, and so was eventually starved to death. Dorthesia Characias — the lady, I 

 know nothing of the gentleman of that name which has been obligingly supplied hy 

 Mr. Walker — looks for all the world like a little lump of the very purest and snowyest 

 wedding-cake sugar, cast in a mould that Bernini himself might have designed : the 

 moulds of Dorthesiee are always elegant, but always deliciously incomprehensible; 

 always cut in open defiance of those little check-strings and chains which entomolo- 

 gists have manufactured as a means of restraining the vagaries of Nature or of fet- 

 tering her to their systems : not only is there no prothorax or mesothorax or metathorax, 

 but there is no thorax at all,— nothing but the little lump of immaculate frosted sugar 

 aforesaid, out of which gmw two black antennae and six black legs ; and yet all is per- 

 fect symmetry, the neatest workmanship that can be imagined: one would think that 

 Nature, in her simplicity, had never heard of Leon Dufour or Audouin, De Haan or 

 Strauss- Durckheim, Orismology or Entomology, Comparative or Transcendental 

 Anatomy. What the frosted-sugar-like surl'ace really is I cannot presume to say, but 



