174 LETTER TO MR. GEORGE [CHAP. xvn. 



the Ash-bark beetles, including your letter of the 23rd and 

 the box of specimens received to-day. Some of the work- 

 ings are quite certainly of H. fraxini. One bit catches the 

 eye at a glance as showing quite typical galleries. In the 

 long strip the workings are not so clearly distinguishable. 

 According to -descriptions or comparison with other 

 specimens they appear to me of both kinds. But I really 

 cannot think of giving you further trouble. We have all 

 that is needed to make out a good, sound account, and 

 I hope, if all be well, to do justice to the subject in my next 

 Annual Report, and that you will be satisfied with my 

 working up of the points of the infestation. 

 With renewed hearty thanks, yours very truly, 



ELEANOR A. ORMEROD. 



To A. W. George, Esq., Sedbury, Tidenham, Chepstow, Agent 

 on Sedbury Estate. 



TORRINGTON HOUSE, ST. ALBANS, 



February 17, 1897. 



DEAR SIR, My work is chiefly on injurious insects, so I 

 am afraid I am not qualified to give you the exact name of 

 this curious collection of cement-like pupa-cases. Still 

 I may say that your description most resembles those of 

 the Mason bee, a kind of Osmia which constructs cells of a 

 plaster formed of little morsels of stone, earth, &c., and 

 then fills them with food and lays an egg on it, walls up the 

 cell, and begins another. The grub in due course hatches 

 and feeds, and goes through its changes to the perfect bee 

 and somehow or other manages to make its exit. These 

 cells are sometimes made on walls, in parties of as many as 

 a dozen (as shown in a figure before me), but as I said, I am 

 not a " specialist " on Hymenoptera (Bees and Wasps), so I 

 would not like to express a decided opinion. Your mention 

 of the Roman coin found near the Severn cliffs is very 

 interesting, for it was quite inexplicable to my father how it 

 happened that, whilst coins are just the things often found 

 in such great plenty amongst Roman remains in the 

 pottery, bones, &c., of which there was such quantity in 

 the site of the Summer Station of the Augustan Legion 

 from Caerwent on the Sedbury cliffs, we absolutely did not 

 have a single coin. Circumstances since we left have made 

 me think that the word I have underlined may be more 

 correct than that none were found. On one occasion it 

 chanced I went when the ditch-diggers were at their 

 dinners, and under a little shelter of turf (which naturally I 



