?' 



ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS 



AND 



PROCEEDINGS OF THE ENTOMOLOGICAL SECTION, 



ACADEMY OF NATURAL SCIENCES, PHILADELPHIA. 



Vol. il MAY, 1891. No. 5. 



CONTENTS: 



Skinner — Description of Plate V 8i i Skinner — Elementary Entomology 89 



Ashton — Trap for capturing Coleoptera 82 Notes and News 91 



Banks — Notes on Spiders 84 : Entomological Literature 95 



Braun — Lepisesia flavofasciata 87 j Doings of Societies 99 



Description of Plate Y. 



Plate V represents the so called protective mimicry of insects. 

 The last few years much ink has been spilled in the discussion of 

 this subject; some writers agreeing that it is undoubtedly protec- 

 tive mimicry and others only accidental resemblance. Drum- 

 mond, |in his work on "Tropical Africa," speaks as follows: 

 ' ' Carlyle, in his blackest visions of ' shams and humbugs' among 

 human kind, never saw anything so finished in hypocrisy as the 

 naturalist now finds in every tropical forest. There are to be seen 

 creatures — not singly, but in tens of thousands — whose very ap- 

 pearance, down to the minutest spot and wrinkle, is an affront to 

 truth; whose every attitude is a pose for a purpose, and whose 

 whole life is a sustained lie. Before these masterpieces of decep- 

 tion the most ingenious human impositions are vulgar and trans- 

 parent. Fraud is not only the great rule of life in a tropical 

 forest, but the one condition of it." 



We are indebted for the plate to the kindness of M. J. F. 

 Sachse, editor of the " American Journal of Photography," who 

 made the original photograph. 



