PROCEEDINGS OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES. 35 
to fifteen), which were furnished with wing-rudiments and live in the water, 
whilst the first specimen that is captured at Huissen, inside the house at a 
lamp, is a female with well-developed wings.’ I must confess that I cannot 
follow this reasoning. Be it remembered that no difference is suggested in 
the males from the different localities, and the supposed distinctness of the 
species rests entirely on the possession by the females in the one case of 
developed and in the other of rudimentary wings. From Armbheim and 
Huissen, males, and one winged female captured; from Overween, males, 
and fifteen unwinged females bred. Ergo, two species! Surely this is a 
non sequitur. It is, in fact, a repetition of Brown’s argument (with which 
T dealt in the ‘Transactions’ for 1872, p. 142), that the winged female 
occurs in one locality, and the apterous females in another locality. I can 
scarcely see how the facts mentioned by Ritsema can be said to fortify any 
opinion one way or the other. So far from proving the duality, they are 
quite consistent with the unity of the species. And recalling the facts that 
Curtis and Dale took both forms of female at Glanville’s Wootton, that 
Brown bred the apterous and McLachlan captured the winged form at 
Burton, and lastly that Ritsema himself, in 1870, found pups at Haarlem 
from which two females emerged, of which one had rudimentary and the 
other well-developed wings, I venture to hazard a conjecture, that if Ritsema 
perseveres with his breeding from Overween larve, he will obtain some 
females with wings as ample as those which flew to the lamp at Huissen. 
“In conclusion, one word of regret, a tribute to Members this Society 
has lost. In the short period since the publication of my former paper on 
Acentropus, of those to whom I then referred as living authors, death has 
removed no less than three—Henry Doubleday, Edward Newman and 
Edwin Brown.”—F. G. 
NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS. 
A History of British Birds. By the late WiLL1AM YaRRELL, 
V.-P.LS., F.Z.S. | Fourth Edition. Revised by ALFRED 
Newton, M.A., F.R.S., Professor of Zoology and Comparative 
Anatomy in the University of Cambridge. Part 10, Nov. 1876. 
Van Voorst, Paternoster Row. 
WE note with satisfaction the appearance of another part of the 
new edition of this standard work, the issue of which is steadily, 
although, we regret to say, slowly progressing. In some measure, 
no doubt, the advancement of the work has been retarded by 
