404 Notes on Some Yorkshire Coleoptera. 
Trichopterygidae, though more were seen, and it would pro- 
bably have proved common if specially searched for. The 
specimens were obtained by shaking the reed rubbish over 
sheets of paper. It has hitherto been recorded for the south 
and London district, the Fen district, Evesham and near 
Dublin. . 
Cartodere filum Aubé.—About a year ago a Hull chemist 
presented to the local museum a collection of preserved 
xerophilous plants from Australia. Recently, while examining 
these I captured about a score of tiny pale yellow beetles which 
proved to be Cartodere filum Aubé, a species easily distinguished 
from the other three British members of the genus by a dis- 
tinct round impression on the anterior half of the thorax. It 
has occurred very rarely in Britain, and invariably in herbaria. 
In other countries it has sometimes been found in fungi. The 
only previous records for the British Isles are Burton-on-Trent, 
in herbarium ; on dried Aconite in the herbarium of the Royal 
Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh; Gumley, Leicestershire, and in 
the Glasnevin Herbarium, Dublin. It is difficult to conceive 
how any beetle could pass through all its stages on such dry 
pabulum as that on which they were found in the Hull Museum. 
The Curator is now left to decide whether to kill the beetles 
and save the plants* or vice versa. All the four British species 
of Cartodere have now been recorded for Yorkshire. 
-O.; 
Animal Communities in Temperate America, as [Illustrated in the 
Chieago Region: a Study in Animal Ecology. By Dr. Victor E. Shelford, 
University of Chicago Press, 362 pages, 12s. net. Many friends of Dr. 
Shelford will welcome this substantial contribution to our knowledge of 
the lower forms of animal life in a very interesting district in Amercia. 
The volume appears as Bulletin No. 5 of the ‘Geographic’ Society of 
Chicago, and illustrates in a remarkable degree the great extent of the 
geographical field on the other side of the Atlantic. The author points 
out that courses in field zoology usually lack the convenient background 
of organization which one finds in the doctrine of evolution when pre- 
senting the animal series from a structural standpoint. The need of some 
such logical and philosophical background into something more unified 
than haphazard discussions of such animals as were encountered in chance 
localities, was keenly felt at the beginning of the author’s experience as 
a teacher of field zoology. Evolutionary background was tried, but 
failed, and was rejected; genetics and faunistics proved inadequate. 
Behaviour as presented and studied by zoologists was incomplete. Plant 
ecological methods were, when unadapted, applicable only in part, while 
much of physiology dealt with organs and internal processes. The organi- 
zation here presented has, in the main, grown out of three lines of thought ; 
the physiology of organisms as opposed to the physiology of organs ; the 
phenomena of behaviour and physiology, much of the data of which can 
be related to natural environments ; and the organised comparable data 
of plant ecology. Of course the actual species being American makes the 
book not quite so valuable as it might otherwise be to English readers, 
but the methods adopted are certainly worthy of consideration. 
* He will probably do both !—Ep. 
Naturalist, 
