630 MR. J. WOOD-MASON ON THE FAMILY EMBIID^. [DeC. 18, 



camping-ground. A violent thunder-storm which suddenly came on 

 while I was searching for the nest or tunnels inhabited by the insects 

 drove me indoors ; and, having to resume my journey shortly after- 

 wards, I had much against my will to forego an opportunity of ascer- 

 taining the habits of the Embiidae that may not soon recur. Not 

 expecting to meet with Embice in such a place, I should have passed 

 them over without notice had it not been for their marked Thysanu- 

 rous gait and shape ; and I was much disappointed at finding, as I 

 soon did, that instead of a new Thysanuran with two-jointed cerci 

 and a living representative of the ancestors of the Staphylinidse, I 

 had got hold of an Embia. 



Some of the specimens obtained on this occasion were forwarded to 

 Mr. M'Lachlan ', who has expressed the opinion that they probably 

 belong to Oligotoma saundersii of Westwood, a species originally 

 described from Calcutta specimens. In none of those which were 

 retained l)y me for my own use are the slightest traces of wings to be 

 detected, although the asymmetry of the caudal appendages, which 

 I consider to be characteristic of and exclusively confined to the 

 male sex, is already quite apparent. The asymmetry of the tergum 

 of the terminal abdominal somite and of the cerci in the males of 

 Necrosia maculicollis, one of the Phasmatidse, appears at the corre- 

 sponding early stage, and in nymphs is quite as strongly marked as 

 in perfect insects. 



Discovery of a Female. — In the following October, on the first 

 zoological excursion I made after my return to Calcutta, I met with 

 an insect possessing all the characters, including the peculiarly 

 fashioned fore legs of the Embiidse, but devoid of all traces of wings 

 and abdominal asymmetry. I found it in the large plant-house in 

 the Botanic Gardens, crawling over the leaves of a plant of the habit 

 of Fittonia. It is a shining black insect with pale-tipped antennae, 

 and as it lay upon the leaves it bore a striking resemblance to a 

 larva of some brachelytrous beetle or to an Earwig with a short 

 forceps. It measured no less than three quarters of an inch in length 

 from the front of the head to the end of the abdomen, and is con- 

 sequently about thrice as large as the smallest, and twice as large as 

 the largest, of the previously described specimens, compared with 

 which it is further remarkable for its thick and firmly chitinized integu- 

 ment. It, in fact, answers exactly to the idea I had termed of what 

 the female would be like, and it is, as I shall show, a female. 



Description of the Female. — In its abdomen, counting the so-called 

 "segment mediaire" as the first somite, as it unquestionably is, though 

 here, as is often the case in other groups of insects, its tergum is firmly 

 ankylosed to the metathorax in adults and its sternum appears to 

 be undeveloped, ten terga, the full number of the typical insectean 

 abdomen, are externally visible, the two penultimate ones (which in 

 the Cockroach and in the Earwig are shortened and squeezed up out 

 of sight between the last or tenth and the seventh) being equally 

 well developed with the rest ; the last or tenth tergum is entire, 

 rounded, obtuse, and deflexed at the end, and, with the two-jointed 

 ^ Proo. Ent. Soc. 1879, p. xliii. 





