1435 
regretted. It is intended to publish a similar ‘Record’ annually, 
and it will be a misfortune to Zoologists if such a work should fail 
for want of adequate support. 
In particularly calling your attention to the “ Entomological So- 
ciety of New South Wales,” I cannot but congratulate its Members 
on the position which their Society has taken, and the interest with 
which we look forward to their ‘ Transactions. Two Parts have ap- 
peared during the year. In the first (Part 3) there is a paper by the 
Rev. R. L. King, “ On the Pselaphide of Australia.” This contains 
a description of a very curious genus, Cyathiger, intermediate between 
the Clavigerine and the rest of the Pselaphide. Another paper, 
by W. MacLeay, Esq., is “On the Scaritide of New Holland :” 
of course many new species are described, and a very useful catalogue 
is given of all the Australian members of the sub-family, amounting to 
102 species. The 4th Part is entirely taken up by the same author, 
with a paper on “ The Genera and Species of Amycteride:” of this 
great and exclusively Australian group there were nearly 200 species 
in the late Mr. W. Sharp MacLeay’s collection alone: 182 species 
are described, all belonging to the long-scaped portion of the sub- 
family, the other portion being reserved. The descriptions are very 
clear, especial attention being paid to the more important and diag- 
nostic characters, so that the determination of species is thereby 
vastly facilitated. 
In the ‘ Transactions of the Linnean Society’ is an article entitled 
“ Descriptions of Fifty-two new Species of Phasmidz from the col- 
lection of Mr. W. Wilson Saunders, with Remarks on the Family, by 
Henry Walter Bates, Esq.” The “remarks” are well worth studying 
by every naturalist, and deserve to be borne in the minds of those 
systematists who maintain that all genera should be exactly defined 
and clearly separable from one another, and who believe that every 
form, at its original creation, was “ endowed with certain features in 
common with other allied species,” and thus received “ its generic as 
well as its specific stamp.” The “great apparent diversity in the 
family” does not amount to more than an irregular homogeneity, and 
the classification is therefore very difficult: “in the Phasmide, as in 
some other groups, Nature,” we are told, “in adapting her species to 
their conditions of life, has, in the process of variation and adaptation, 
involved all those parts of structure which usually yield, by their 
partial constancy, characters for the definition of generic groups.” 
The number of known species now amounts to 540. 
