pitcLy red, but attached to the deiraal envelope, in various places, and without any 

 semblance of regularity, were a number of minute flattened bodies, perfectly white, 

 and having the appearance of little flakes of snow : these are so numerous as to give 

 the little creatures quite a dusty appearance: the legs are six ; their attachment ap- 

 proximate; their length 035 of an inch, or equal to a diameter and a half of the 

 body: they consist of the four ordinary parts ; a well-developed coxa, a femur, tibia 

 and tarsus, so equal in length that there was no discrepancy measurable by the mi- 

 crometer; the tarsus is exarticulate or composed of a single piece, and armed with a 

 single, terminal, slightly curved, and apparently immovable claw. This raononycous 

 character of the foot does not appear the very best for prehension, yet the prehensile 

 power of the legs is beyond all question, for the little ones crawled about their mother's 

 body with the most perfect nonchalance, never tumbling, even by chance, from the 

 dizzy elevation of her antenna;. Each of them had a head, which, however, was a 

 fixture, having no power of motion, but being closely anchylosed to the trunk, and its 

 presence only to be detected when viewed from above, by a line of demarcation ; below, 

 on the contrary, it bore a large, straight, and really formidable beak, which Savigny 

 would doubtless have resolved into the constituent parts of an ordinary insect-mouth, 

 but which I could make nothing more of than a beak : its very connexion with the 

 head seemed problematical, and yet I take that for granted ; but as a matter of 

 appearance, mind T am very particular not to say a matter of fact, this suctorial in- 

 strument seemed to come out of the stomach ; indeed, supposing its office that of a 

 pump, for pumping out the sap, one might aptly call it a 'stomach-pump.' The head, 

 moreover, bore — and these were very evident personal property, whatever the pump 

 might be — two very conspicuous seven-jointed antennae, which gradually, almost im- 

 perceptibly, decreased in size from the base to the apex: the fdurth, fifth and sixth 

 joints were each marked by a scarcely perceptible ring or indentation at half their 

 length, thus indicating the subcutical existence of three more joints, making ten in 

 all, the number which the mother actually possessed." 



Mr. Westwood remarked that the female of the Dorthesia, so accurately described 

 by Mr. Newman, was figured by Burmeisler in his ' Handbuch.' With regard to the 

 snow-white covering of the insect, he had no doubt it was a modification of the waxy 

 secretion common to many of the Homoptera. 



Mr. Waterhouse observed that the fine powder on the Coleopterous genus Lixus 

 had also been regarded as a waxy secretion. 



Mr. Curtis communicated the following extracts from a letter addressed to him by 

 Dr. Maclean, of Colchester : — 



Economy of Gonepteryx Rhamni. 



" Gonepteryx Rhamni assumes its perfect state in the end of July or beginning of 

 August. I have bred numbers of them. In a fortnight or month, according to the 

 state of the weather, they become very fat, containing within them also a large bag of 

 honey, and in a short time afterwards but very few are to be seen. For several seasons 

 in succession I imprisoned some of these fat specimens, and placed them in a northern 

 aspect in cases of wood and earthenware, in which I placed rough pieces of old de- 

 cayed bark of trees, &c. Several specimens lived through the winter: they appeared 

 to be dead during cold weather, but after being in a warm room for an hour or much 

 less I believe, they began to crawl about and expand the wings. If fine, that is very 



