122 Journal New York Entomological Society. l v i.xvi 



region seemed to be distinctive, mixed with some few eastern forms which had spread 

 westward throughout Canada. 



Professor Wheeler remarked that he had found in the study of the ants a sort of 

 intermediate condition and agreed with Mr. Charles Adams that ^here seemed to be 

 two centers of distribution in British Columbia, an eastern and a western one, and 

 that material gathered from north of Lake Superior showed a mixture of the two 

 conditions. 



Mr. Joutel said that Saperda calcarata and tridentata spread clear across the 

 country in the north, and the western forms were like the eastern. 



Mr. Joutel, in speaking of " The Persistence of Acquired Characters in Different 

 Stages of Insects," stated that he had been inbreeding for a number of years a species 

 of Japanese Bombycine moth and no deterioration in size or health was noticeable in 

 recently bred adults or larvze. Occasionally he had noticed a denuded specimen 

 hatching from an apparently normal cocoon, and in one species he had found five 

 newly hatched denuded adults, but was not successful in mating two denuded forms. 

 He did succeed in mating and securing eggs from one denuded and one undenuded 

 adult moth. The eggs obtained from this mating of the denuded form were different 

 from the normal egg in hot having a coating on them, which makes it appear probable 

 that this peculiarity was due to some condition of the adult. 



Mr. Matausch exhibited numerous, excellent and well-colored original drawings 

 of exotic Membracidse. Most of the species represented were from South America. 



Mr. Davis exhibited sections of a white pine tree, each about a foot in diam- 

 eter, showing the tunnels and chambers made by the carpenter ant, Cnmponotus her- 

 culeanus pennsylvanicus De Geer. The tree had stood over 60 feet high and was one 

 of a grove on Staten Island, but the ants had removed so much of the solid wood 

 that it had snapped off about 6 ft. from the ground during a gale of wind. The nest 

 occupied about 4 in. of the diameter of the tree, and for the first four feet most of the 

 wood had been removed. Above this, for 15 in., there were galleries and chambers, 

 and above this again there was a finger-like tunnel l / z in. in diameter and 8 in. long, 

 that occupied the center of the trunk. Mr. Davis also showed a section of a scarlet 

 oak that had been occupied by the same species of ant, and the nest was divided off 

 in the same way as in the pine, with this difference that the character of the oak 

 wood did not permit of the excavation, in the lower part of the nest, of the many 

 paper-like layers represented in the corresponding portion of the nest in the pine. No 

 matter in what kind of a tree, there seems to be constructed by this ant the same 

 general kind of architecture. 



Professor Wheeler exhibited a beetle {Xenodusa cava) a number of which Mr. 

 Pricer of Urbana, Illinois, found in the burrows of Camponottfs pennsylvanicus. 

 This beetle is not common in collections. 



Dr. E. P. Felt stated that considerable time had recently been spent by his 

 office on investigations of gall midgets (Cecidomyidte), but he had found it rather 

 slow work and had been much handicapped owing to the tangled synonomy of the 

 group. To show how much work they had been able to accomplish towards collect- 

 ing and breeding these forms he gave a table showing side by side with the number 

 of species given by Aldrich in his list, the number they had been able to add. 

 Whereas, of those groups already investigated, a total number of 24 species is given 

 by Aldrich, Dr. Felt has secured something like 217, and of these, too, a large 



