24 MK. R. J. TILLYARD : LIFE-HISTORIES AND 



close to it the largest of the five small creeks. This was bordered with 

 splendid tree-ferns, and here and there opened out into fairly deep pools, full 

 of the decaying trash of sticks and fern-leaves. Striking up the rocky bed 

 of this creek, I reached at last a small and narrow gorge, whose sides rose 

 50 feet and were a dense mass of prickly bushes and creepers. A few yards 

 above this a beautiful little waterfall tumbled down from an overhanging 

 ledge. All around was a dense mass of fern growing on vertical rocks *. 

 As T looked up at this scene, a fine male of A. costalis darted out from under 

 a tree-fern and settled in the prickly mass of bushes 30 feet above me. 

 Marking the spot, I clambered up through the steep thicket as best I could, 

 dragging my net flat on the rocks behind me, until I was able to sit down 

 within striking distance of my quarry. He was perched, as luck would have 

 it, in about the only place where a stroke of the net was possible. This was 

 done by pushing the net very slowly along the ground until it was under 

 him, and then striking quickly upwards, thus securing the Dragonfly together 

 with the broken twig on which it was resting. 



The next day I searched again for the larval skin by wading up the same 

 creek, and examining every single frond or twig that either drooped into or 

 stood up out of the water. After three hours^ work, during which time I 

 had covered nearly three-fourths of a mile of creek and had examined some 

 hundreds of leaves and sticks, I arrived within two hundred yards of the 

 waterfall. Here, on lifting up a large drooping frond of tree-fern from 

 the water, my hand touched a perfect larval skin, which, clinging close to 

 the brown midrib of the dead frond, was almost indistinguishable from it in 

 coloration. It was the skin of a male, most probably of the male which I 

 had captured the day before, for I never found another. 



The same year (1911) two of my entomological friends, Mr. A. H. Lea 

 and Mr. H. J. Carter, coleopterists, visited Mount Tambourine in South 

 Queensland. They returned with a report of an enormous brown Dragonfly, 

 seen on one of the small mountain-creeks there, which- they had failed to 

 capture owing to its great speed, I determined to visit this new locality, 

 which I reached just before Christmas, 1912. The weather was continuously 

 wet, but Odonata were abundant. In a clay or two I was rewarded with the 

 sight of a fine A . costalis, which passed me at lightning speed late one after- 

 noon, as I was exploring a small creek. The next day, on visiting the same 

 spot about 5 P.M., another male appeared, and flashed by me before I could 

 even think about striking. Realizing how impossible it was to hope to catch 

 them without strategy, I carefully examined the creek, and finally selected a 

 very narrow opening between two reed-clumps, where it seemed to me the 

 Dragonfiies might either pause in their flight or be struck at while passing 

 swiftly through the narrow passage. (This place is seen in the foreground 



On these ferns I took on the same day a new species of Agriolestes (A.fontamis). 



