May, '06] ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS. 1 79 



It seems to me that the larva of polyphemus took this man- 

 ner of spinning up on the branchlets of this oak, to prevent its 

 falling in the water, where in due course of time it would 

 have frozen to death. About one mile from Bayonne, at a 

 suburb known as Greenville, I found on higher ground, 

 hundreds of white birch bushes, with almost every cocoon of 

 polyphemus spun in leaf and certain to drop below during 

 autumn gales. 



I wish to add my testimony regarding the habit of T. poly- 

 phemus, for the safety of this race, which I was put in mind 

 of by a note by Miss Caroline Soule, in the December Ent. 

 News, Vol. XVI. 



Editorial Note. — We do not believe this caterpillar sufficiently intel- 

 ligent to make stemmed cocoons over highways. The absence of the 

 ordinary cocoons in such places is accounted for by the fact that they 

 would rapidly be swept away by the ordinary traffic of the street or high- 

 way after they fell to the ground. 



A Malpighian Tube Within the Heart.— A few days before read- 

 ing Dr. Riley's article with this title in the April News, page 113, I had 

 given out, to my class in Invertebrate Zoology, some transverse sections 

 of a grasshopper. On looking at one of the students' slides I noticed 

 two sections of a Malpighian tube within the heart, but thought their 

 presence there to be due to displacement in clearing the sections and dis- 

 solving the paraffin. Dr. Riley's article recalled this appearance and when 

 the class met to study the sections, I at once saw that we had another 

 of those apparently rare cases which Dr. Riley has described. Fortu- 

 nately, I still had enough sections of this grasshopper on hand to give 

 the following account of the course of this Malpighian tube. It entered 

 the ventral surface of the heart by a cardio-coelomic aperture, at a level 

 slightly in front of the hind end of the stomach, passed forward, within 

 the heart, to a level slightly anterior to that of the hind end of the gastric 

 coeca, bent upon itself and passed backward, still within the heart, to at 

 least as far as the level of the anterior part of the rectum. A gap in the 

 available sections of this region exists so that I am unable to state whether 

 the tube terminated within the heart, or whether it passed out into the 

 pericardial chamber as in Kowalevsky's case reported by Dr. Riley. 

 This grasshopper was also a Melanoplus, probably M. femur-rubrum, and 

 a female. I do not recall having seen any other instance of a Malpighian 

 tube within the heart, and I would endorse Dr. Riley's view that such 

 occurrences are accidental.— Philip P. Calvert, University of Pennsyl- 

 vania, Philadelphia. 



