ON SOME NEW AND I^ARE BRITISH COLLEMEOLA 495 



Short Notes on some New and Rare British Collembola 



By Richard S. Bagnall, F.E.S. 



Eariy in the year 1907, recognizing the difficulty of doing 

 original work in the Coleoptera without easy access to a large 

 entomological library and good reference collections, and 

 with so little time at my disposal, I commenced to collect 

 material and literature in certain little-known and much 

 neglected groups, chiefly the Collembola and Thysanura, and 

 the Thysanoptera, In the first-named group I cannot pretend 

 to have made any systematic collections, nor have I studied 

 the forms except in a general way. Nevertheless I have had 

 the good fortune and pleasure of finding a large number of 

 the species then known as British, including nearly all the 

 species recently recorded by my friends Prof. Carpenter and 

 Mr. Evans. 



Members of the Collembola are soft-bodied apterous insects, 

 mostly minute, and as a rule furnished with a forked spring 

 under the body, by which they are able to jump about with 

 surprising agility, this latter characteristic earning for the 

 species the common name " springtail." They should be 

 collected into tubes of about 70 per cent, alcohol by means 

 of a fine camel-hair brush. 



In some notes read before the Entomological Society of 

 London on December 4th, 1907,''' I recorded Orchesella 

 rvfescens (Linn.), Isotoma hibernica Carpenter, Proisotoma 

 minuta (Tullb.), Agrenia bidentictilata (Tullb.), Folsomia 

 qnadriocidata (Tullb.), Xenylla brevicaiida Tullb., Anurida 

 tttUbergi Schott, and Bonrletiella cincta (Tullb.) as British. 

 Of these, however, Isotonia hibernica and Xenylla brevicauda 

 had just been recorded by Prof. Carpenter from Ireland ; P. 

 minuta had been taken in Edinburgh and mentioned in a 

 newspaper, but not recorded in any scientific publication 



* Trans. Ent. Soc, London; Proceedings, pp. Ixxx.-lxxxiii., 1907. 



