LINNEAN SOCIETY OF LONDON. Xxiii 



Still unfinislied, in the Transactions of the Natural-History 

 Society of Ehenish Prussia. In this paper the author enumerates 

 the Grerman plants, in the alphabetical order of their generic 

 names, and gives lists of the species of insects of all orders found 

 feeding upon each. About three years ago Professor Wagner of 

 Kasan announced his discovery of the larva, apparently, of a di- 

 pterous insect, which was capable of producing other similar larvae 

 through a certain number of generations — as he thought, by a 

 change of the fatty mass of the body. A translation of Wagner's 

 paper, published in the Zeitschrift fiir wissenschaftliche Zoologie, 

 has appeared in the Natural-History Review. Since the first 

 announcement of this astonishing discovery (which, it is needless 

 to say, was received with much incredidity by zoologists). Professor 

 Wagner and others have succeeded in rearing the perfect insect 

 of this singular larva, which proves to belong to the family Ceci- 

 domyidae, and has been described by Meinert under the name of 

 Miastor metraloas, in a memoir published in Kroyer's Natur- 

 historisk Tidsskrift. Various papers on these viviparous larvae 

 have appeared in the Grerman scientific journals ; and a digest of 

 the results of some of them will be found in the Annales des 

 Sciences Naturelles for 1865. Perhaps the most important of 

 the more recent papers is that by Professor Leuckart, in the 

 Arehiv fiir ISTaturgeschichte for last year, translated in the 

 Annals of Natural History for March 1866, in which the 

 author shows a strong analogy between the mode of formation of 

 the peculiar reproductive bodies of the larva and that of the 

 ordinary ova of insects. 



The periodical publications specially .devoted to entomological 

 subjects in this country, on the continent of Ein-ope, and in America 

 continue in full activity ; and even in New South Wales we find 

 an' Entomological Society publishing in its Transactions papers 

 of considerable value. But before proceeding to the consideration 

 of any of these or of the many other entomological papers to which 

 we shall have to call your attention, it may be as well that we should 

 first devote a few words to those contributions to the literature of 

 entomology which have appeared in our own publications. These 

 have been neither few nor unimportant. In the first rank of them 

 we must place the elaborate " Monograph of the Nitidulariae," by 

 Mr. Andrew Murray, commenced in the concluding part of the 

 twenty-fourth volume of our Transactions, a work of immense 

 labour and research upon an obscure and difficult group of Beetles. 

 The same part contained also a short paper, by Mr. Haliday, " On 



