XXX 



there was no evidence that insects were attracted to the coloured Mantises 

 as insects to flowers, for if this were not so the resemblance was meaning- 

 less ; but the evidence required having been published by Mr. Wallace in 

 the September number of ' Macmillan's Magazine,' he had come prepared 

 to make known Mr. Peals and his own observations, little expecting that 

 reference would be made to the same subject from the chair. According to 

 Mr. Wallace, a small Mantis which exactly resembled a pink Orc/its-flower 

 was shown to Sir Charles Dilke in Java. This species was not only said to 

 attract insects, but even the kind of insects (butterflies) which it allures and 

 devours was mentioned. 



Mr. Wood-Mason, in reply to a question of the President, stated that 

 Schizocephala hicornis, a species remarkable for its enormously elongated 

 and filiform legs and body, was really another case of the same offensive (as 

 opposed to the purely defensive resemblance of, for example, the PhasmidcB) 

 resemblance. It lived on tall grasses {Saccharum sjpontaneum — wild sugar), 

 to which in course of time it had gradually become perfectly assimilated in 

 form as well as in colour : and in the adult condition was fully thirty times 

 as long as broad, but when it quitted the egg the length of the body, in pro- 

 portion to its greatest breadth, was only as about fifteen to one ; from which 

 fact in its development we might with confidence infer that the species 

 is descended from some shorter and stouter form ; that this could only 

 have differed by characters of the most subordinate importance from such 

 existing African and Indian forms as Episcopus chalybea (actually by Bur- 

 meister referred to the same genus), Oxyophthalma coUaris, gracilis, &c., 

 it was only necessary to study those forms to become convinced of. 



Sir Sidney Saunders read the following : — 



" Remarks on the Specific Identity of the HamjMead Atypus. 



" In the report of our Proceedings at the August meeting of this year, 

 which has just appeared in the third part of our ' Transactions' (p. xv.), it 

 is stated that the spider exhibited by me at a previous meeting as Atypus 

 Sulzeri had since been referred to the Rev. 0. Pickard-Cambridge, who 

 stated that the insect was certainly not A. Sulzeri, but that he considered it 

 to be A.Beckii (Cambridge), which would probably be found to be the same as 

 A. piceus (Thorell), though he was not certain, as the only female which he 

 had of that species was too much damaged to admit of any satisfactory 

 comparison, the type of A. Beckii being an adult male. I was not present 

 at the meeting referred to, or I should have explained that the identical 

 specimen which I had exhibited could not be the one referred to by 

 Mr. Cambridge, it having never since passed out of my hands. But, as 

 regards the name ascribed to the Hampstead species, Thorell, in his 

 'Synonyms of European Spiders' (published 1870—1873), adopts the 



