ICHNEUMONID^ OF * FAUNA BOREALI- AMERICANA.' 243 



This is a rare book, and the Insects (vol. iv.) is now quoted 

 by Quaritch at £5 10s. It was William Kirby's (thirty-fifth 

 and) last publication, when in his seventy-eighth year, and 

 it immediately followed his Bridgwater Treatise of 1835, so un- 

 necessarily adversely criticised in the old Ent. ]\Iag. Kirby had 

 no especial knowledge of the Ichneumonidse, which appears 

 strange in view of his wide acquaintance with the Aculeata, till 

 one remembers the chaos then obtaining in this family ; and he 

 was not a subscriber to Gravenhorst's work of 1829. 



In Sir John Franklin's first and second expeditions to the 

 Polar Seas, Dr. Eichardson was associated with him and en- 

 trusted with the charge of the Natural History department, a 

 feature of which was the insects collected during the brief 

 summers of the Arctic regions. Richardson on his return 

 applied to Sir W. J. Hooker to describe the insects, and the 

 latter immediately wrote to Kirby and induced him to undertake 

 the task. The insects were forwarded to Barham Parsonage, 

 Suffolk. Richardson wrote to Kirby from Chatham on May 

 15th, 1829, that the majority of the collection consisted of 

 Coleoptera, owing purely to the inconvenience of preserving the 

 more fragile insects, and this probably accounts for the paucity 

 of Ichneumonidse, of which some two hundred species were 

 known from the same district in 1842 {cf. Sir John Richardson's 

 * Arctic Searching Expedition,' ii. 352). 



" The insects were presented, in the joint names of Dr. 

 Richardson and Mr. Kirby, to the British Museum " (Freeman's 

 ' Life of Kirby ' [1852], 449) ; but there is no mention whatever 

 of their reception in the official "Accession Book" nowadays. 

 The specimens are, however, recognizable by the fact that they 

 are ticketed with a small green, diamond-shaped label, bearing 

 an MS. capital R. Only five species of parasitic Hymenoptera 

 are enumerated by Kirby : — 



Fcemis jacidator, Linn. 



Ichneumon f err ucjatory sp. n., p. 258 ; no sex nor number of 

 specimens indicated. — Since my remark upon this species was 

 published (Entom. 1909, p. 133), I have found in the General 

 Collection four specimens of Banchus ferrugineus, Provancher 

 (Nat. Canad. 1877, p. 14, &c.), bearing the characteristic green 

 labels, and well representing Kirby's description. One of these 

 is the type, and the species, which is merely referred to by 

 Cresson (Trans. Amer. Ent. Soc. 1877, p. 207), must be known 

 as BancJms ferriigator, Kirby. 



Cryptus viduatorius, Fab., p. 259 ; one specimen taken in 

 lat. 54. — I cannot find this in the British Museum ; Fabricius' 

 species is, I believe, unknown outside Europe. 



Cryptocentrum lineolatiim, sp. n., p. 260 ( ? sic). = Rhyssa 

 ptersuasoria, Linn. S , var. areola alarum nulla. — In the Collection 

 is a specimen of this species agreeing so entirely with Kirby's 



