496 



DIPTERA 



CHAP. 



and Wandolleck has recently made fur this and some allies the 

 new family Stethopathidae. It seems doubtful whether these 

 forms are more than wingless Phoridae. 



Fam. 29. Platypezidae. Small flies, with porrect three- 

 jointed antennae, first two joints short, third longer, with c 

 terminal seta; no bristles on the back; hind legs of male, or of 

 both sexes, with peculiar, broad, flat tarsi ; the middle tibiae bear 

 spurs ; there is no empodium. Platypezidae is a small family 

 of flies, the classification of which has always been a matter of 

 considerable difficulty, and is still uncertain. The larvae are 

 broad and flat, fringed at the margin with twenty-six spines ; they 

 live between the lamellae of Agaric fungi. At pupation the form 

 alters but little ; the imago emerges by a horizontal cleft occurring 

 at the margins of segments two and four. 1 We have four genera 

 (Opetia, Platycnema, Platypeza, Gallomyia), and nearly a score of 

 species of Platypezidae in our British list, but very little seems to 

 be known about them. There is much difference in the eyes of 

 the sexes, in some at any rate of the species, they being large and 

 contiguous in the male, but widely separated in the female. 



Fam. 30. Pipunculidae." Small flies, with very short antennae 



bearing a long seta that is not terminal; head almost globular, 



formed, except at the back, almost entirely by the large conjoined 



eyes; the head is only slightly smaller in the female, but in 



the male the eyes are more approximate at the top. This is 



another of the small fami- 

 lies of flies, that seems dis- 

 tinct from any other, though 

 possessing no very im- 

 portant characters. In many 

 of the flies that have very 

 large eyes, the head is 



FIG. 238. HeadofP<)/>r,iCMtesp. A, Seen from either flattened (/.('. CO111- 



in front ; B, side view, showing an uutenua pre ssed from before back- 



magnmed. Pyrenees. 



wards, as in Tabanidae, 



Asilidae), or forced beneath the humped thorax (as in Acro- 

 ceridae), but neither of these conditions exists in Pipunculus ; 

 in them the head extends far forwards, so that the area of the 



1 Frauenfeld, Verli. Ges. Wicn, xx. p. 37, pi. iii. 



2 For monograph of Pipunculidae, see Becker, Berlin, ent. Zeitschr. xlii. 1897, 

 pp. 25-100. 



