Insects. 9475 



The synonymy of this species is somewhat confused, and it is not 

 always clear, from the descriptions of the older entomologists, whether 

 they had this or the following species in view. I hope, however, to be 

 able to offer good reasons for making the above references and for 

 omitting that of De Geer (quoted by Ratzeburg), a statement of which 

 reasons will be met with in the description of a following species. 



These larvae make their appearance every year in some numbers 

 upon different species of willow, and, as they are pretty large and 

 bright coloured, are readily detected. I remember, as a boy at school, 

 making drawings of them, and attempting to rear them, but 1 never 

 got an imago from the cocoons. Since that time I have often seen the 

 larvae and had them sent to me, and as often made the attempt to 

 rear them, but with no belter success, until the summer of 1861. 

 The larvae with which I had made my former essays had all gone 

 into the ground in September, and the imagos would not have made 

 their appearance until the spring : now anyone who has attended to 

 the rearing of insects well knows that in those cases where the larva 

 has to remain so long in the cocoon a hundred circumstances may 

 arise to interfere with the desired result. However, this summer 

 I found a considerable number of these larvae on willows at Rozendaal, 

 in North Brabant, and, to my great satisfaction, at the expiration of 

 seventeen days, the imagos made their appearance. I am not able to 

 say anything as to the eggs ; they are probably laid in a slit made in 

 the bark of a branch of the willow, very likely in rows often or eleven 

 each ; but I have no evidence on this head. The larvae attain a length 

 of a little over two centimetres ; Brischke states that they grow to one 

 Rhineland inch (2.62 centimetres); however, I have never seen them 

 so large. I have not observed any very young examples, but from 

 the plates given by Ratzeburg and Brischke, I conclude that they do 

 not differ in colour from the older ones. 



In the full-grown larva the first three and the last two segments are 

 orange, the rest of the body being blue-green ; the head very shining 

 and black. It appears to me that Brischke has made his too blue ; 

 but he also distinctly says in his description that some examples are 

 blue, without any admixture of green : it remains, however, a question 

 whether he has not made some mistake on this point, as he calls the 

 colour of the first and last segments red-brown, in which he differs not 

 only from Ratzeburg but from his own figure. All the examples 

 I have seen had those segments of the body distinctly orange. The 

 legs are twenty in number; the six thoracic legs (fig. 4) are obscure 

 reddish yellow at the base, then green ; on the first joint are three little 



