The Zoologist— August, 1866. 313 



Notes on Alpine Entomology. 

 By T. V. WoLLASTON, Esq., M.A., F.L.S. 



The interesting paper of Mr. Albert Mviller, in last month's 

 * Zoologist' (S. S. 273), seems to call for a few passing remarks; and 

 as he has appealed to an observation or two of mine in the 'Variation 

 of Species,' it will not be out of place if I supplement the facts which 

 he has adduced by thanking him for the able and suggestive manner 

 in which they have been brought to bear on certain specified 

 peculiarities of Alpine Entomology. 



The particular phenomenon to which Mr. Miiller draws more imme- 

 diate attention, and which was so carefully noticed by Mr. Pascoe, 

 I have not myself observed ; for my own researches, at very lofty alti- 

 tudes, have been made chiefly in southern countries, where even the 

 lower limits of the snow are at so high an elevation that they are com- 

 paratively ditficult to reach ; yet at the head of the St, Gothard Pass 

 in the Alps, I well remember, during the month of May, to have been 

 forcibly struck by the great accumulation of insect-life at the bottom 

 of some rounded depressions in the snow, which latter, from a cause 

 which I could not ascertain, had melted so as to expose the soil 

 beneath it — thus forming, as it were, black oases amidst an ocean of 

 unsullied white. They were mainly Coleoptera ; and as I was suflS- 

 ciently contented at the time merely to collect them, I omitted to take 

 any particular note of the circumstances under which they were found. 

 But if insects (at any rate dark-coloured ones) may retain warmth 

 enough, even singly, to occasion small hollows in the snow, when, 

 inebriated with excess of oxygen, they " gradually sink down" into 

 their last resting-place, might not a hole thus unwittingly excavated 

 serve as an occasional pit-fall for other specimens, the accumulated 

 heat from which (even though exceedingly slight) would probably 

 sufl5ce to shape-out the little basins to which I have just alluded ? 



But there is evidently a distinction to be drawn here, which, although 

 acknowledged, is scarcely perhaps suflSciently insisted upon by Mr. 

 Miiller; for the creatures which occupy the nival regions arrange 

 themselves conspicuously under two heads — (1), those which are con- 

 Jined to the uplands (never descending into the tracts beneath ; and 

 (2), those which either wander thither of their own accord, or else are 

 carried nolens volens by the currents of air from the plain*. Now if it 

 be really true that a small hollow in the snow can be caused by the 



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