69i KEPORT — 1897. 



Herbert Druce kindly lent me those moths which are not represented in the Hope 

 Collection in the Oxford Uuiversitj' Museum. 



2. Economic Entomology in the United States. By L. O. Howard, Ph.D. 



The author described, with some detail, the successive steps in the development 

 of the science of economic entomology in America, and showed that the necessity 

 for work against injurious insects is much greater iu America than in Europe. 

 He stated that about sixty persons are now officially engaged in this work in the 

 United States, and that their salaries amount to about 9(3,000 dollars. Of these 

 sixty persons thirty-three are attached to the State Agricultural Experiment 

 Stations and seventeen to the Department of Agriculture at Washington. A 

 general resume of the character of the work done in these several offices was given, 

 that done in the Department at Washington being described at length. 



3. On some remains of a Sepia-like Cuttle-fish from the Loiver Cretaceotts 

 rocks of the South Saskatchewan. By J. F. Wiiiteaves. 



In 1889 four rather remarkable fossils, which probably represent the dorsal 

 side of theinternal shell, or sepiostaire, of a new species of an apparently new genus 

 closely allied to Sepia, were collected by jMr. T. C. Weston, of the Geological 

 Survey of Canada, from the Montana or Pierre-Fox Hills formation of the Later 

 North American Cretaceous at the South Saskatchewan, opposite the mouth of 

 Swift Current Creek. 



Each of these fossils is imperfect posteriorily, and not a trace of the mucro is 

 preserved in any of them. The most perfect of the four is about six inclies and a 

 quarter in length bj- about three inches and a quarter in its maximum breadth. 

 It is elliptical or elliptic-ovate in outline, slightly convex, but marked with five 

 narrow, acute, but not very prominent longitudinal ridges, with rather distant 

 faint depressions or shallow grooves between them. One of these ridges is median, 

 but the two lateral ones on each side are slightly divergent, and a bilateral sym- 

 metrj' is very obvious. 



A considerable portion of the surface of each of these fossils is obscured by a 

 blackish and apparently bituminous substance, so that it is difficult to trace any of 

 the lines of growth continuously, though they are remarkably well preserved in 

 patches. Near the lateral margins the incremental strire are simply concentric, 

 but in the median region (wheif^ they are fine, extremely numerous and densely' 

 crowded) each one is produced anteriorly into an angular and acutely pointed lobe, 

 with its apex upon the summit of the median ridge. From this fact it may be in- 

 ferred that the anterior margin of the dorsal side of the shell was pointed in the 

 middle when perfect. 



So far as the writer has been able to ascertain, there is no known genus of 

 Sepiidse, fossil or recent, to which these fossils can be satisfactorily referred. They 

 bear, no doubt, a certain general resemblance to the internal shells of Sepia itsell"; 

 but in the sepiostaires of all the recent species of that genus which the writer has 

 been able to examine the radii of the dor,sal surface are broad, flattened, and almost 

 obsolete. As already suggested, they seem to indicate a new genus and species of 

 Sepiida3, for which the name Actinosepia CuJiadensis may not be inappropriate. 

 In any case these specimens, if correctly interpreted, are the first well-marked re- 

 mains of sepiostaires that have been found in a fossil state in Canada. 



4. The Statistics of Bees. By Professor F. Y. Edgeworth. 



Applying to bees one of the methods which he applied to wasps last year, the 

 author has found for the species Bombus hortorum that a voyage, from and back 

 to the nest, made in the later aiternoou, lasts on an average from thirty to thirty- 

 five minutes. For hive-bees the corresponding length of time appears to be less 

 than ten minutes. 



