186 (January, | 
I will give you the subsequent history of the remaining broods. Some brought — 
into the house a week since were yesterday commencing to spin up.—J. C. MILLER, 
Lime Farm House, Eltham, 28th November, 1870. 
Transformations of Lycena Alsus.x—For some time past, Mr. J. Gedge’s note on 
this species, which was published in Vol. iii, E.M.M., at p. 205, had been tempting 
Mr. Buckler and myself to try to rear it from the egg, and during the past season 
we have put our plan into execution. 
Several imagos, captured in Hampshire about June 15th, were sent on to me ; 
I placed them on a plant of Anthyllis vulneraria in a large cylinder, and, although — 
they died off rapidly, one female at least survived to lay about a dozen eggs, June | 
16th-18th ; the larves began to hatch on the 21st, and at once took to the flowers | 
of Anthyllis, either eating a hole through the downy calyx, and then through the 
corolla to the immature seed-vessel ; or else beginning by eating some of the lip of © 
the corolla, and then going down to the base of the style. From first to last the 
seed certainly was the part preferred, and whilst the larvee were small they fed on 
it hidden within the corolla; when they had attained some size, they pierced | 
the side of the calyx and corolla, and thrust in the forepart of their bodies to get 
at the seed-pod with its single seed, leaving their hinder parts outside, but still well 
hidden among the dense bunch of flowers which formed each head. 
By July Ist, they were barely half-grown, but in the next fortnight they 
developed rapidly, some of them by the 13th having attained the length of a quarter _ 
of an inch, and soon after this the most advanced were full-grown : others, captured 
in the locality from which the imagos came, were not so far advanced, but most of 
these also had ceased feeding by the end of July: they then placed themselves — 
about on the gauze covers of their cages, or on the under-side of anything in the 
cages that would hide them, and we expected to see them change to pupe. | 
However, up to the date of writing of this no such change has taken place, but 
those larvee, which have not died, are waiting on quietly, and I suppose will not 
now turn to pups till spring. 
The egg seemed generally to be deposited low down on the calyx of the 
Anthyllis flowers, and though thus hidden from casual observation, it may be easily 
detected on a careful search : it is, as might be expected, very small, shaped like 
the eggs of its congeners, namely, round, but more flattened than globular, with a 
central depression on the uppersurface: this depression is the only place in which 
the pale green ground colour of the egg can be well seen, because the rest of it is 
closely covered by a raised white network of rhombhoidal meshes, which, when 
viewed in profile, are seen to stand out boldly from the shell. 
The larva escapes by an irregular hole in the middle of the upper surface of | 
the egg, and is a mite of a fellow to look at, dirty whitish-green in colour, with a | 
little black head, a dark place on second segment, and the tubercles bearing longish 
hairs: after a day or two the colour becomes somewhat reddish, and at the end of 
a week pale brown, with browner dorsal and sub-dorsal lines. After this there’ 
begins to be a little variation in colour in different individuals, some being more of 
a pinkish-brown, others more of a chocolate colour, the distinct dorsal stripe being 
of a deeper tint of the ground colour, and commencing as a broad triangular mark 
on the third segment, and becoming gradually narrower up to the eleventh, where 
