84 THE ENTOMOLOGIST S RECORD. 



when he strove to clear up the number of British species and their 

 limits, although he probably was the first to investigate them in all 

 their stages as thoroughly as he has done ; the genus Zygaena affords 

 an unlimited field for analysis, but synthesis is the hard nut to crack. 

 His stumbling-blocks in the particular case of fili/pendulae and 

 lonicerae-trifolii were the five-spotted form of the south in the former, 

 in which he saw a transition to the latter, and the British insect which 

 he called hippocrepidis, Stephens, and which Rebel rightly renamed 

 tutti, because that name had been created by Hubner for quite another 

 Zygaena. Tutt makes a separate species of it, mentions it in the 

 description of filipendulae as a race (p. 509), places it at the end of this 

 species, and then at p. 544 actually says " we have been unable, on the 

 strength of our field observations, to come to any other conclusion than 

 that A. hippocrepidis is a near ally, if not direct offshoot of A. trifolii" 

 He was evidently in a very unsettled state of mind about it ! The 

 reasons he gives for his last conclusion are so excellent that I think 

 they leave little doubt as to its correctness. They correspond to the 

 fact repeatedly observed by Oberthiir and others in N. France that 

 trifolii and palustris, Obth., produce a six-spotted form. This is in no 

 way surprising. The Zygaena nearly all vary so much and in so 

 similar a manner that it would have been more surprising never to find 

 six spots in such a near ally of filipendulae as the lonicerae-trifolii 

 group. We now know that also Z. angelicae, 0., produces quite 

 commonly a six-spotted form, which hitherto would have been ascribed 

 to filipendulae : it has been described by Burgeff in Mitt. d. Miinchener 

 Ent. Ges., 3913, and named by him rhatisbonensis (I.e., 1914, p. 66.). 

 I possess it from Regensburg and Bucharest. I can furthermore add 

 that I have received a series of specimens evidently referable to the 

 Zygaena from Bilbao, which Oberthiir has called seeboldi (1910) and 

 which probably is also partly rubra, Dziurzynski (1908), and that lam 

 perfectly convinced it is not a race of stoeehadis, as hitherto supposed, 

 but a lonicerae, producing frequently a six-spotted form especially in 

 the female sex. I have acquired this certainty not only from the look 

 of these insects, but also from the fact that a year later, no less than 

 one hundred specimens were reared from larvse obtained from the same 

 locality, if not exactly the same spot, as the series mentioned (Oviedo 

 in the Asturias) and not one exhibited any trace of a sixth spot on 

 either surface. I might also add that some of these individuals have 

 quite the build and aspect of trifolii. It thus became quite obvious to 

 me that seeboldi is a Spanish lonicerae and that it may produce a 

 variable number of six-spotted individuals, according to localities and 

 years, just as form tutti appears in numbers or entirely vanishes 

 amongst the trifolii of the N. of France and England. I will deal with 

 seeboldi more at length in a paper on lonicerae and also point out that 

 there exists in Calabria a race quite intermediate between it and the 

 race vivax, Vrty., of Central Italy ; it has been called silana by Burgeff 

 and herthae by Stauder. Another race, which puzzled Oberthiir con- 

 siderably and which he calls " extremely enigmatic," is that of the 

 Bouches-du-Rhone and the Var ; he expressed it by calling it anceps ; 

 he states he felt very ill at ease about it because it consisted in a 

 perfect mixture of lonicerae, trifolii and filipendulae, which could in no 

 way be discerned from those of many other localities .of distant 

 Provence, and in a larger number of transitional individuals, so that 



