1894.: 93 



NOTES ON THE EARLIER STAGES OP THE NEPTICUL^, 

 WITH A YIEW TO THEIR BETTER RECOGNITION AT THIS PERIOD 



OF THEIR LIFE. 



BT JOHN H. WOOD, M. B. 



(Continued from page 50) . 



The NepficulcB of the pear {Pyrus communis). "When making 

 some observations on food plants early in the course of these notes, I 

 remarked that I had never met with atricollis on the pear. This no 

 longer holds good. Twice in the past autumn I have come upon 

 a small colony on the plant, numbering between them perhaps a score 

 of individuals. The species is so well known that nothing further 

 need have been said, were it not that there was a peculiarity about the 

 mines that is not commonly seen when they occur on apple or hawthorn. 

 Every one is aware that the mine in the angulifasciella group has 

 quite a character of its own. Starting from some point in the body 

 of the leaf, it presents three perfectly distinct portions ; first, a bunch 

 of convolutions ; next, shooting out from this, a gallery, seldom of 

 any length ; and lastly, a blotch. Now, atricollis when living on apple 

 or hawthorn by no means follows this plan, but mines much after the 

 fashion of regiella, setting out with a long gallery round the margin of 

 the leaf, from which, as from a base, the blotch springs. Each one, 

 however, of the pear mines was true to type. Each one began in the 

 body of the leaf, and each one presented the bunch of convolutions, 

 the short gallery, and the blotch. This sent me once more to the 

 apple and hawthorn bushes, and I learnt that at any rate in the latter 

 of these plants the mine does occasionally conform to type, when the 

 egg happens to be deposited well away from the edge. It is, then, the 

 position of the egg that determines the character o£ the mine. When 

 it is laid upon or near the edge the larva seems unable to resist the 

 fascination of keeping there (a fascination that appears to possess 

 every species that finds itself, whether by rule or accident, in that 

 position), and so the bunch of convolutions gets unravelled and spread 

 out along the margin. It had always struck me as strange, that in a 

 group so strongly accentuated by the similarity of the mines, larvae, 

 and images, one of its members, whilst closely conforming in the last 

 two points, should fail to do so in the first ; now^ the anomaly is to a 

 great extent explained. 



I also find on the plant three gallery-miners, viz., oxyacanthella, 

 pyri, and minus culella, lout the last named in such scanty numbers that 

 I have not yet succeeded in rearing it, and for the ability to determine 



