COLEOPTERA IN INVEENESSSHIRE. 



321 



differ to a degree which might well, 1 should imagine, involve a differ- 

 ence of habit in their respective coleopterous denizens. 



That a physiological difference so induced should necessarily be 

 specific, cannot, perhaps, be so easily admitted. Nature is full of cases 

 of complete diversity of habit between forms which are proved 

 genetically to be merely varietal. The most obvious are, perhaps, 

 among domesticated animals. Two breeds of dogs for instance may 

 differ in habit to an extent which must involve the entire nervous 

 system without affecting the reproductive in the slightest, and if it be 

 objected that such differentiation has been deliberately induced by 

 selective breeding within a comparatively few generations, the obvious 

 reply would be that, in the case of the beetles, nature represents a 

 selective force as efficacious, if not as rigid, as that of human agency, 

 extending, certainly, over a much longer period, but leading to possibly 

 precisely analogous results. 



Again, it seems to me a fallacious application of the reproductive 

 criterion to assume that, because two groups of beetles are physically 

 ■debarred from interbreeding (by a different habitat), if they had 

 the opportunity their intercourse would be infertile. They are not 

 necessarily different species because they cannot, and do not, inter- 

 breed — you must also prove that they would not if they could. Now 

 I should be sorry if by any of these remarks I might seem to be 

 impugning the validity of any species to, which they might apply. 

 Such species may, for anything I know to the contrary, be perfectly 

 valid on morphological grounds. I am, however, certainly, although 

 perhaps incorrectly, assuming a resort to physiological data, not 

 merely as corroborative, but as substitutive in their differentiation, 

 and my contention is that, in the present state of our knoivledge, such 

 a resort may be misleading. In a word, that if we cannot satisfactorily 

 establish a species morphologically, we cannot do so at all, and the 

 result of such an attempt must be merely the still further encumbrance 

 of an arena already thick with the restless ghosts of defunct pseudo- 

 species — simulacraque luce carentum. 



Coleoptera in Invernessshire. 



By JA.MES E. BLACK, F.E.S. 



I spent last June in the heart of the Highlands, about four miles 

 from the village of Newtonmore, a locality from which I have already 

 recorded a fair number of beetle captures. This year, the weather was 

 of the finest, and, as the countryside is truly that of " ... brown 

 heath and shaggy wood, land of the mountain and the flood," there is 

 every scope for the ardent collector's energy. 



One marked feature of the present visit was the absence of the 

 larger C'arabidae. Very few were seen, even of the common species 

 usually abundant there. Carabus violaceus, 0. arvensis, and C. (jlabratus, 

 it is true, did turn up, but only a single example of each, despite much 

 searching for the latter species, the solitary specimen of which was 

 taken on the edge of a foot-track across a moor. On the peaty surface 

 of the same moor a very interesting Pterostichus was found, beneath a 

 stone. It must provisionally be put down as P. versicolor, Stm., but is 

 quite black in colour, and, besides this, has strong regular punctures all 

 down the elytral strise, a feature which does not appear to exist in 



