Ixxxv 
Mr. Edward Sheppard read the following extract from the ‘ Daily News’ of the 
29th of March, 1867 :— 
** According to the Melbourne papers just received, enormous swarms of beetles 
have been noticed lately in Victoria, Australia. In the early part of January a swarm 
was noticed near Ararat, in Victoria, flying in a column about twenty yards broad, 
and keeping in compact order. They cast a dark shadow on the ground, and they 
were an hour in passing the spot from which they were seen. At a certain point they 
turned off at right angles. The Eucalypti in the neighbourhood of these insects have 
been stripped of every particle of foliage. Great numbers of the beetles fall to the 
ground during the flight. The noise they{make while flying is like that of a hurricane 
playing in the rigging of a ship. The colour of these beetles is a dark bronze.” 
Mr. Bates said that Anoplognathus was found amongst Eucalypti, but he thought 
the insect referred to was more probably a grasshopper than a beetle: it was not pro- 
bable that Coleoptera would thus migrate in swarms. 
Mr. Weir and Mr. Wallace referred to the clouds of Coccinelle which were 
commonly observed in the hop-growing districts of Kent. / 
Mr. M‘Lachlan mentioned that Dr. Brauer had recently described, under the name 
of Pharyngobolus Africanus, the earlier stages of a species of CXstride, the larva of 
which had been detected in the throat of the African elephant. 
Mr. F. Smith exhibited an ichneumon, Rhyssa persuasoria, placed in his hands by 
Mr. Bond, which appeared to have worked its long ovipositor, bradawl-fashion, through 
a piece of fir-wood, in quest of the larva of Sirex juvencus, on which it is parasitic; 
part of the ovipositor had been left in the wood. Mr. Bond had some years ago found 
at Bournemouth two ichneumons with their ovipositors so firmly fixed into wood that 
he was unable to remove them. Mr. Smith had always hitherto supposed that the 
Rhyssa inserted its ovipositor into the holes made by the Sirex, instead of making a 
hole for itself in the tree: if the latter were the rule, how did the ichneumon detect the 
presence of the larva within the wood, and know where to insert its ovipositor? 
Mr. Edward Doubleday, however, had told him that he had seen twenty or thirty 
specimens of the female of a Pelecinus which had perished with their elongated abdo- 
mens inserted into the stem of a tree, whence they had been powerless to extract them ; 
the male had a clavate abdomen, but that sex had never been met with by Mr. 
Doubleday. 
Mr. Bates inquired whether an ovipositor was not, homologically, a modification 
of one of the abdominal segments. 
Mr. Smith thought it was rather a modification of the aculeus. 
Mr, Wallace suggested the converse, namely, that the sting was a modified ovi- 
positor, and that its use as a weapon of defence was a secondary and acquired use. 
Mr. G. 8. Saunders exhibited a number of Poduride, found near Stokesley, in 
pools or puddles consequent upon the melting of the snow, which had receutly lain on 
the ground in the North of Yorkshire for two or three weeks. 
The President believed them to be Podura (Anura) tuberculata of Templeton, 
though their shrivelled state rendered them difficult to identify with certainty. 
Mr. Wallace mentioned that he had received a letter from Mr. Jackson Gilbanks, 
of Whitefield Castle, Wigton, on the subject of the distastefulness to birds of brightly 
coloured larve ; the writer had frequently observed the dislike, or rather the ‘“ abhor- 
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