PARTHENOGENESIS IN LEPIDOPTERA. 25 



history of the Psychidce, I nevertheless received assurances from 

 various Lepidopterologists that they had notwithstanding ob- 

 served a Parthenogenesis in the Psychidce, and felt certain that 

 they had made no mistake. All the more exact statements 

 referred to species of Sac-bearers, which are no longer considered 

 as true Psychidce, but are placed amongst the Tineida, as the 

 genus Tal&poricL) or more properly Solenobia. 



I felt myself incited by such communications to turn my 

 most particular attention to these little Sac-bearers, which I had 

 previously taken but little notice of, in which, being then in 

 Freiburg, I had to congratulate myself on the assistance of 

 Herr Reutti, a very able and credible Lepidopterologist. The 

 two species, Solenobia lichenella, Linn, and Solenobia trique- 

 trella, Fischer von Roslerstamm*, which are very abundant in 

 the immediate vicinity of Freiburg, offered themselves to our 

 observation, and of these, after my removal from Freiburg to 

 Breslau, I found I was able to make use of many specimens 

 at the latter place ; in Berlin also I collected at two different 

 times a great number of sacs of these two Solenobice, so that 

 during the years 1850, 1851, and 1852, I got together several 

 hundreds of these sacs, but to my greatest astonishment none 

 but female individuals were excluded from these sacsf? and only 

 a single locality furnished me with a couple of males of Solenobia 

 triquetvella. 



I was enabled to observe that these virgin female Sac-bearers, 

 which I constantly watched in little vessels closed with glass- 

 lids, clung firmly to the outside of their sacs, in the same 

 fashion as the females of Fumea nitidella, and filled the sac with 

 eggs by pushing in their laying-tubes ; however, these female 

 Solenobice differed from the female Fnmece in this respect, that 

 the former in escaping and creeping out dragged the pupa-case 

 with them quite out of the sac. The pupa-case then remained 



* In regard to the determination of these two species of Sac-hearers, I refer 

 to Zeller's classical description of the genera of Tineacea, in the Linncea 

 Entomologica, Band vii. 1852, p. 343. 



f Wocke also collected about GOO sacs of Solenobia lichenella in the vicinity 

 of Breslau, from which he did not obtain a single male. See the thirty-first 

 Jahresbericht der Schlesischen Gesellschaft fur vaterldndisclie Cultur uber das 

 Jahr 1853, p. 182. 



