282 



THE KNTOMOLOGIST S RECOED. 



of a few days some 60 or 70 eggs were deposited on the tow. The 

 eggs began to hatch on October 2nd, and the young larvag were 

 placed in a small breeding-cage upon a growing plant of groundsel, 

 upon which they fed up very rapidly, and by the 28th of the month 

 most of them had spun up. The first moth appeared on November 

 14th, and the last one on November 30th. Fifty-nine moths were 

 bred, and they were very fine examples and nearly twice the size of 

 their parents. Several pairs were confined together in small breeding- 

 cages, and supplied with food on a piece of sponge. Only two pairs 

 were noticed in cop., and, strange to say, both of the females, although 

 kept a long time, died without laying a single egg. The females of 

 two or three other pairs, that I had not seen in cop., deposited three or 

 four hundred eggs upon fibres of tow and pieces of moss. About 

 two-thirds of these proved fertile, and the first larva hatched on 

 December 8th, and, of the remaining eggs that did not hatch, a great 

 many contained fully formed larvfe. On December 21st I counted 

 over 200 larv« feeding ; by January 6th many were nearly fullgrown, 

 and, on the 9th, I noticed many of them spinning up, so they only 

 took about a week longer than the first brood. The first moths, 5 in 

 number, emerged on January 22nd, and the last on February 29th, 

 102 in all. A few of the larvae failed to spin up, and a great many 

 pupffi did not produce moths, for only about half were bred. The 

 larvffi and pupas were kept in a bathroom where the temperature 

 seldom fell below 54° during the night, owing to the hot water 

 cylinder being next door in the drying cupboard, with only a thin 

 wooden partition between, and the breeding-cages were placed on a 

 shelf attached to this partition. Of the 102 moths of this second 

 brood several pairs were kept for eggs, but most of them died without 

 pairing or laying, and the 3 or 4 females that did lay only produced 

 a small number of eggs. These began to hatch on February 11th. 

 The imagines of the second brood were considerably smaller than 

 those of the first brood, being about the same size as their grand- 

 parents, and the third brood, which began to appear on April 2nd, 

 were still smaller, and their progeny, who began to emerge on June 

 10th, were such dwarfs that I did not care to carry on the brood any 

 further. 



Thelarvffi of C.fluviata are very sluggish in their habits, feed chiefly 

 at night, and during the day hide away among the lower stems of 

 their food or beneath the leaves. 



Among the several hundred moths bred there were sundry examples 

 of two or three distinct and interesting aberrations, which I think are 

 worthy of names and descriptions, so I append them below : — 



(1) C. fluviata ah. marginata. n. ab. — Male, fore- and Mndwings typical, 

 but beyond the narrow hindmarginal black line there is a conspicuous pearly-grey 

 fringe. Female, forewings purple-brown ; a dusky transverse median band, widest 

 near the costa, crosses the wings obliquely, and encloses the discoidal spot, which 

 is dark and minute, and surrounded by a consjDicuous whitish ring ; between the 

 median band and base of wings, there are two faint and rather zigzag whitish lines 

 crossing from costa, where they are most distinct, and form a sharp angle to inner 

 margin ; about half way between the median band and outer margin, there is a 

 similar angulated wavy line, and beyond it, and quite close to the outer marg^'n, 

 there^is another, but fainter, wavy line ; at the apex of the wings there is a short 

 oblique dusky patch pointing downwards ; the outer margin is inwardly distinctly 

 bordered by a narrow black line, which, in some specimens, viewed through a lens, 

 looks as if it was composed of a series of spots arranged closely together in pairs, 



