404 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 



that he noticed a dozen or so every morning at about six a.m., con- 

 gregated always on the same twig of the same plant {Phenax hirtus, 

 " a member of the nettle family "), growing deep down in a gorge, and 

 overhanging the rocky bed of the stream — all apparently, at that 

 early hour, sound asleep. I therefore visited the same spot one 

 evening, between five and six p.m., and found as we had expected, 

 that they had now begun to assemble for the night. I counted eight 

 specimens, clustered closely together on one small twig, all with 

 their long, closed wings hanging downwards — a withered twig it was, 

 covered with brown, prickly seeds, possessed of unusually adhesive 

 tendencies, and it struck me that this was probably the main cause 

 for this twig, and others always more or less dried up, being espe- 

 cially favoured ; though of course it also admits of protective sugges- 

 tions. Bersa said he had always found them in the morning on these 

 very same twigs. When disturbed they flopped sleepily about in the 

 immediate neighbourhood, but soon tried to resettle, invariably 

 rejecting all the green leaves, and returning ultimately to the dried-up 

 dead twigs by preference, most of them selecting the same one as 

 before. — Margaret E. Fountaine, F.E.S. ; Bath, Jamaica, October 

 7th, 1911. 



Stridulation inthePupaofanIchneumonid. — During the month 

 of June last I noticed that several ■ of the Tortrix larvae that I beat 

 from oak carried a small external parasitic larva firmly attached to 

 the second and third segments. Some of these parasitised caterpillars 

 I kept in chip boxes, and in the course of a few days the parasitic 

 larvae, which were then of a pale green colour, and nearly as large as 

 their hosts had been when first attached, had completed their growth 

 and spun thin transparent, papyraceous, white cocoons, with a 

 medial band of a thicker texture. In a state of nature these cocoons 

 are formed within the rolled leaf which has previously been in- 

 habited by the host, and a curious thing about them is that if wetted 

 they turn to a deep brown in colour. As soon as the larvae had changed 

 to pupae, I was much surprised to find that they made a very notice- 

 able sound by wriggling in their cocoons. The noise appeared to be 

 produced by the abdomen, and, in the case of the female, the 

 ovipositor, which was curled over the back in the usual way, being 

 scraped against the cocoon, and was distinctly audible at a distance 

 of several yards, so much so that a maid, whose duty it was to clean 

 the room in which these pupae were kept in a drawer, was much 

 alarmed and distressed, thinking she had heard a "ticking spider" 

 (the local name for the death-watch beetle). The imagines emerged 

 in July, and I at first took them to be the Lissonotid Phytodictus, 

 but on submitting a specimen to Mr. Claude Morley, he very kindly 

 pointed out that they were Phytodictus polyzonias, Forst. — G. T. 

 Lyle ; Brockenhurst. 



Lepidoptera op Torquay. — In a list of the moths and butterflies 

 occurring in the Torquay district (Journal of Torquay Nat. Hist. 

 Soc), Mr. H. Lipton enumerates upwards of five hundred and twenty 

 species and varieties. 



Ehopalocera of Cyprus. — Mr. John A. S. Bucknill, in a Supple- 

 ment to ' English School Magazine,' Easter, 1911, gives a " List of 



