XXVI 



Mr. Venall, for examination, a few remnanls of the Walton swarm, and had been 

 favoured with the following note: — 



" Having looked closely through the Diptera you sent me, I find that out of fifty- 

 six or fifty-seven specimens which I can recognize from the fragments, there are 

 twenty-seven Syrphus ribesii, sixteen S. coroUae, eiglit S. pyrastri, two S. luniger, 

 one S. balteatus, one or two S. vitripennis ?, and one S. pyrastri, var. unicolor. This 

 last variety is generally rare, but has this year appeared in tolerable abundance. The 

 specimens of S. vitripennis are in such condition that I cannot speak for certain about 

 them : they may be small examples of S. ribesii." 



Mr. Dunning remarked that only one name, S. balteatus, was common to the lists 

 of Mr. Home and Mr. Verrall, so that, if all were correctly named, no less than ten or 

 twelve species of Syrphus occurred in the swarm on the S.E. coast on the 24lh of 

 August. 



]\Ir. Verrall added that S. balteatus was rare in swarms; S. decorus be believed to 

 be a discoloured variety of S. auricollis; S. topiarius, if British, was extremely rare, and 

 did not occur in the Collections of the British Museum or the Entomological Club ; 

 and if Eristalis tenax occurred in a swarm of Syrphidse, it could only have got there 

 accidentally, as it might appear anywhere else from its universal distribution. He had 

 once come upon the tail end of a swarm of Syrphidae, and the stragglers seemed to be 

 nearly all S. auricollis and its var. macnlicornis. 



With reference to the swarms of Coccinellte, the President and Mr. M'Lachlau 

 remarked that in this case there was no necessity to have recourse to the hypothesis of 

 immigration, as they had both noticed, previously to the appearance of the beetles, an 

 unusual quantity of the larvae of Coccinellse in the southern counties of England : the 

 simultaneous hatching of a large number in one locality caused a scarcity of food 

 there, and compelled many of them to move elsewhere; arriving at the sea-coast the 

 majority were stopped, whilst some, attempting to go further, fell into the sea and were 

 washed back with the tide. The littoral phaenomena of the swarms were thus 

 sufScienlly accounted for. Mr. M'Lachlan added that the larvce of Coccinella would 

 eat the pupee of their own species (see Ent. Mo. Mag. iii. 97); and Mr. Janson 

 mentioned that, during the present season, he had had an apple-tree completely 

 covered with black Aphides (commonly called American blight), the whole of which 

 were cleared ofi" in three or four days by Coccinella 7-punctata. 



With reference to various letters which apjjcared during the autumn in the daily 

 papers, Mr. J. Jenner Weir said that the "fireflies" reported at Caterham were the 

 males of the common glow-worm ; and Mr. F. Smith mentioned that he had a 

 number of so-called " glow-worms '' sent to him from Margate, which proved to be 

 larvae of Telephorus. 



Mr. Pascoe remarked that, though insect-swarms were not common on or very near 

 to the surface of the earth, there must be a great abundance of insect-life in the upper 

 atmosphere; the destruction of insects at a considerable elevation by swifts must of 

 itself be enormous. 



With reference to the height to which insects may attain, Mr. Albert Muller 

 recalled the fact, recorded by Mr. F. Walker (Entom. Weekly Intell. vii. 76), of the 

 discovery of a Chlorops liueata enclosed in a hailstone which fell during a storm on 

 the 18th of July, 1859. 



