IN TTTE BRITISH ISLANDS. 3/> 



Portland. He says : ' One night in September I had been sugaring, 

 and while passing down the terrace in my garden, which is within a 

 few yards of the sea, an insect flew down to my light and fell to the 

 ground. On examining it, I at once saw that I had got something out 

 of the common way. It looked uncommonly like P. ni, but I feared it 

 was too good to be true.' The specimen is a very perfect Plusia ni, and 

 a most satisfactory confirmation of the title of the species to be included 

 in the British list. As Plusia ni must now be fully admitted to rank 

 as a British species, a few words upon the characters which distinguish 

 it from the closely allied species may be useful. It is most nearly 

 related to P. gamma, but smaller, hardly so large as P. interrogation. 

 It is a somewhat paler, greyer insect than either ; the y-mark is entire* 

 and straighter than in gamma, that is, not so curved upwards, and the 

 subterminal line is much indented and rather indistinct, but has 

 several black wedge-shaped streaks springing from it, and pointing towards 

 the base of the wing. The small tufts of scales at the sides of the ab- 

 domen are yellowish " (<Ent. Mo. Mag.', vol. xxv., p. 160). Whilst Mr. 

 Nevinson writes : " With reference to the capture of Plusia ni recorded 

 in your last number, it may interest Mr. Barrett and others of your 

 readers to hear that my brother netted an excellent specimen of the 

 above-mentioned insect in the vicinity of Swanage, Dorset, in August, 

 1885. Unfortunately, the net being damp, the thorax is somewhat 

 rubbed, otherwise the insect is in first-rate condition. Although the 

 species is readily to be distinguished from its allies, to make assurance 

 doubly sure, I showed the specimen to Messrs. Butler, Waterhouse 

 and other entomologists, who all unhesitatingly pronounced it to be an 

 indubitable P. ni (< Ent. Mo. Mag.', vol. xxv., p. 184). At the Entom. Soc. 

 of London meeting on July 2nd, 1890, Mr. Stevens said that when at 

 Exeter he visited the Museum, and was pleased to see the original 

 specimen of Plusia ni in the late Mr. H. D'Orville's collection, taken 

 at Alphington, near Exeter, in August, 1868. 



Of Plusia ni, Mr. T. D. A. Cockerell writes : " The recent records 

 of Plusia ni in the South of England, suggest an enquiry as to what is 

 exactly meant by our (British) Plusia ni. P. ni, a South European 

 species, is represented in America by a form called P. brassicce, Riley, 

 which is abundant and injurious to cabbages in the United States. 

 Now, as is not unusual in Plusia, we have in brassicce a species so 

 near to ni as to be very frequently confounded with it, and constant 

 enough in its characters to be regarded as distinct. For this reason, a 

 specimen now believed to be brassicce, found in England years ago, 

 was recorded as ni, and is still supposed to be such by many British 

 entomologists. The question therefore naturally arises, are these 

 recent captures really ni, Hb., or brassicce, Riley ? If they are brassiccf, 

 the natural inference is that they are somehow imported from America, 

 in the same way as H. albifusa^ must certainly have been. I need not 

 go any further into this matter, but hope that a re-examination will 

 be made of the English examples of " ni " to see what they really are " 



* I hardly understand why Mr. Barrett emphasises the fact that the jj/.mark 

 in P.ni is entire. I never knew it otherwise in P. gamma, so that in this respect 

 they would appear to he similar, except that Professor Zeller records the mark 

 as broken in P. ni (vide extract ante p. 34). 



\Vide remarks re Hadena trifolii var. albifusa, ante vol. iii., pp. 84-85. 



