920 THE ENTOMOLOGIST’S RECORD. 
established facies, in the absence of any force within or without acting 
upon it, why should it depart from the facies. Its ability to survive 
will depend on the presence of enemies in its new habitat, which 
cannot be ascertained now. It will be exceedingly interesting to watch 
whether in time (it may be centuries) to come, if it does survive in the 
new habitat, it will be forced into an association with Anosia yilippus, 
or Anosia berenice, or one of that group of Danaidae, which a very small 
step on the part of the diocippus 2 would bring about. 
Perhaps I may also be permitted to say that I consider I am 
entitled to hold to my own opinion, “ that the theories would lose 
their value to me if they could not be applied throughout.” I will 
explain why. 
I may be peculiarly constituted mentally, other people are better 
able to express an unprejudiced opinion on that than I am, but I flatly 
decline to swallow two different laws to explain precisely similar opera- 
tions in respect to which all obtainable material facts are precisely 
alike. I should distrust both explanations in the light of the know- 
ledge of the existence of the other. 
If the theories under discussion cannot be applied throughout to 
explain similar facts (I do not claim more than this), they become at 
once a halting, lame and impotent makeshift, and really hardly worthy 
to rank as theories of scientific value, poor things of shreds and patches, 
which as far as I am concerned! should consign to that capacious rag- 
bag, or scientific scrap heap wherein, or whereon, have been cast so 
many ancient and flyblown tales. They would keep company with a 
creation of the world in seven days of 24 hours measured by Greenwich 
time; with the toads entombed for centuries in a mine, and with the 
swallows hibernating in the mud of the River Thames, and I for one 
should never take the muck-rake to fish them out with, there they 
might repose. 
(Z'o be continued.) 
SSCIENTIFIC NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS. 
BoaRMIA RHOMBOIDARIA AB. REBELI IN FRANCE UNDER AN ALIas.—In 
a recent number of the Bulletin dela Société Hntomoloyique de France 
(1916, no. 11, p. 188, tab. 1) M. Moreau describes and figures a sup- 
posed new Geometrid aberration as Boarmia gemmaria ab. nigerrima, 
Moreau. This is none other than our familiar friend the “ black 
rhomboidaria,” figured from Norwich by Barrett (Lep. Brit. Is., vii., 
tab. 315, fig. 1g, 1h) and now well known from North Kent. Moreau 
wastes some energy in satisfying himself and his readers that his new 
form cannot be the same as var. perfumaria, Newman, and entirely 
overlooks the fact that it was described and named from Hungary ten 
years ago, by Aigner-Abafi (Wnt. Zeit. Guben, xix., p. 209; Rov. Lap., 
Xiii., p. 78) as ab. rebeli— both wings entirely smoky black, only the 
sharply dentate submarginal line remaining white’; and is duly 
registered in Rebel’s edition of Berge under that name. Minor varia- 
tions in the distinctness of the three pale lines I do not consider 
separable, though it is not impossible that future research may reveal 
some kind of parallelism with the robsoni-thompsoni phases of Aplecta 
nebulosa ; in any case the aberration is Mendelian. 
M. Moreau captured his first example in the neighbourhood of Paris, 
