52 Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society Vol. XI 



this specialist spoke of the cruelty shown the sea birds there by 

 summer visitors. These mutilated the young terns, severing their 

 wing-tips to carry home as mementoes and leaving the crippled 

 victims suffering and helpless. And he wrote: "The shadow of 

 a tern's wing is but slight and its hue is that of the surf along the 

 shore, yet it might well forever cloud the memory and darken the 

 record of the heartless wretches who practised such devilish 

 cruelty upon the helpless innocents of Penikese." 



In your own Bulletin a writer who has delved into the past 

 has brought out wonderful treasures from Egypt, from Greece, 

 from sages and poets of olden days, even quoting Sanscrit freely 

 in his writings as if it were his native patois. 



It has been a sort of fashion these last years, the introduction 

 of entomology into fiction. I have come across several novels 

 lately in which the hero or some subordinate character is a col- 

 lector of insects. One such book is " Mr. Hobby," published a 

 year or two ago. And Joseph Conrad, in his " Lord Jim," intro- 

 duces such a character, a merchant named Stein. The author 

 describes the hero's room with its "dark boxes of uniform shape 

 and color on narrow shelves," and speaks of his " Buprestidse and 

 Longicorns, horrible miniature monsters, looking malevolent even 

 in death." What do Messrs. Schaeffer, Leng, et al. think of that 

 description of their beautiful favorites? Just fancy calling our 

 brilliant Buprestis rufipes or fasciata or any species of our grace- 

 ful Strangalia or Bellamira, horrible and malevolent ! 



But I must stop here. This is a wandering, erratic sort of 

 essay, and, as I look back over it I see that its title it most mislead- 

 ing. For surely it is not entomology and just as surely no one 

 could call it literature. 



THE VELIINAE OF THE ATLANTIC STATES 



By J. R. DE LA Torre Bueno, White Plains, N. Y. 



In a previous paper* the larger forms of the Gerridse, the sub- 

 family Gerrinas, were considered ; here we deal with those minute 

 species so seldom seen at large and still more infrequently in col- 



*i9ii, "The Gerrids of the Atlantic States (Subfamily Gerrinse)," Tr. 

 Am. Ent Soc, XXXVII, No. 3, pp. 243-252. 



