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upon the discussion in Trans. Ent. Soc. Lond., 1906, pp. 394-6, 

 Avere contained in a letter written Nov. 6, 1907, from uhich 

 the following passages were quoted : — 



' ' Peradcniya, Ceylon. 



" A flight of winged Termites came into my bungalow last 

 night, and I was fortunate in witnessing an attack by the fly 

 — Ocho'omyia jejuna — upon one of them. Several of the 

 Termites had shed their wings. The fly pitched beside one of 

 them and followed it for some time, making half-hearted feints 

 at attack before it finally seized it. I could see that the point 

 of attachment was at about the middle of the dorsal surface 

 of the abdomen. As the fly seemed inclined to carry off its 



[xxvii 

 victim, I covered the pair with a glass bowl. But this alarmed 

 the fly and it released its hold and refused to renew the attack. 

 So I bottled the specimens and have been examining them this 

 morning. I find that the segmental rings of the Termite are 

 partially separated and that there is a. distinct wound in the 

 soft intersegmental tissue, from which the ji;ices of the body 

 are exuding. I next dissected out the tongue of the fly and 

 — after boiling in liq. potass. — mounted it in glycerine. I 

 was interested to find that — far from being unai-med — there is 

 quite a battery of strong chitinous teeth and slender lancet- 

 like points on the inner face of the apical loljes. There is first 

 a stout median conical tooth. Near the centre of each lobe 

 are two very dense stout curved teeth, the outermost bidentate, 

 the inner one with small denticule on one side. Slightly 

 above this is a scries of smaller bidentate teeth — two of them 

 mesad and one laterad of the larger teeth. Above these again 

 is a close series of some thirteen or moi'e sharply-pointed 

 ligulate processes. 



" In view of these very effective-looking weapons, it can 

 scarcely be maintained that the fly is incapable of inflicting 

 a wound. 



" As this question was brought prominently before the 

 public in your recent exhaustive paper on predatory insects, 

 you might — if you consider these notes of sufticient interest — 

 read them at a meeting of the Entomological Society." 



Professor Poulton said that he had shown the preparation 



