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THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 



transverse lines at all, and one meets with it occasionally in 

 Macrothylacia ruhi, in certain Noctuids, &c. But so far as my 

 observation goes, it is nowhere else so persistently recurrent as 

 in the Larentiidte. There are very few of our '* carpet-moths " 

 in which it is not recorded, and in many it has appeared 

 repeatedly ; so that most of our moderately large collections can 

 boast some characteristic examples of it. When I was specially 

 interesting myself, some ten or eleven years ago, in Coremia ferru- 

 gata and C. unidentaria, I obtained information of the existence 

 of some half-dozen very striking examples of the extreme nar- 

 rowing of the median band in the latter (ab. coarctata, mihi, ex 

 Warr. MS.), and I have since heard of others, and of two or 

 three in the allied ''ferrugata" (rightly to be called spadicearia, 

 Schiff.). In C. designata, my friend Mr. Goldthwait has bred 

 some nice examples, and one of Mr. Sydney Webb's is figured in 

 Barrett (pi. 343, fig. 2 6); in C. munitata I have myself taken one 

 in Aberdeenshire ; whilst in such species as Xanthorhoe Jiuctuata, 

 X. montajiata, and Epirrhoe alternata {sociata), quite a large 

 number are known. Are our friends on the Continent less keen 

 on these chance aberrations than we ? I have a rather extreme, 

 narrow-banded X. montanata from Hamburg, priced at six- 

 pence (only six times the value of typical specimens), which 

 seems to me strictly parallel to the extreme Coremia unidentaria 

 ab. coarctata, a form that fetches about a sovereign at Stevens'. 

 My specimen of Melanthia ocellata, figured by Barrett, plate 

 338, fig. 2 b, was most generously presented to me by my old 

 friend Dr. F. J. Buckell, who took it at Wimbledon on June 5th, 

 1890, and has been recorded by him. I have never yet seen nor 

 heard of another to equal it, though specimens with the band 

 narrowed to a less extreme degree turn up occasionally ; but as 

 the extreme form is always liable to recur, and most of the aber- 

 rations of this nature have received, or are receiving, distinctive 

 names for convenience of recording, I propose to apply one in 

 the present case as follows : — 



Melanthia ocellata, L,, ab. coarctata, mihi, n. ab. Median 

 band extremely narrow, width hardly exceeding 2 mm. at the 

 widest part, and the boundaries almost meeting at the narrowest. 

 Type figure, Barrett's * Lepidoptera of the British Islands,' vol. 

 viii. pi. 338, fig. 2 h. 



In Perizoma (Emmelesia) I have a North Devon specimen of 

 P. tmniata, agreeing with Strand's recently described ab. angus- 

 tifasciata (Arch. Math. ogNat. xxv. No. 9, p. 17, 1903)— "the dark 

 median band so narrowed that its breadth is scarcely one-sixth 

 of the wing-length." In A Jiaitis plagiata, the narrowing of the 

 central area results in a very striking aberration, fairly well 

 known to British entomologists, though, I think, unnamed as 

 yet ; for here, always and necessarily, we get what only extremely 

 rarely happens in the forms with wider central area — that area 



