HARVEST MITES. 119 



CASE three eyes in a triangular cluster in the posterior lateral angles 

 of the thorax is a good character, but Duges failed to see these 

 eyes. Should there prove to be any error about them, and should 

 the marginal papillae on the abdomen of Bryobia not be present 

 in all the species of that genus, then there would be nothing to 

 prevent this species taking its place among them; or for that 

 matter, if we once begin to speculate on the possibility of errors 

 in the figures, there is not much to say against its being the same 

 species as the preceding Bryobia speciosa, or the following Tydaeus 

 mutabilis. Without some special ground of suspicion, however, this 

 is not warrantable and we must act according to our lights. The 

 young is rose-red, the perfect insect varies from dirty red to dark 

 brown, with a tinge of red with some white spots on the back and 

 on the margin. Its anterior legs are much longer than those of the 

 young. The male is smaller and redder than the female. Duges 

 found isolated individuals on many plants and under stones. In 

 the south of France he found it in families in the light down 

 which clothes the under side of the leaf of the plane-tree. In 

 autumn he found it under the stones in the public walks, in entire 

 families, which led him to think that, at that season at least, it 

 quitted the trees in order to multiply more securely. In this 

 country, Mr. Albert MiiUer mentions (^Entomological Monthly 

 Mag. 1867-8, p. 71) that it occurred when he wrote (August) in 

 countless numbers on the flint gravel covering the approaches to 

 Elmer's End Station, near London. 



It is also probably this species to which the following notice in 

 Cooper and Busk's Microscopic J ouriial refers. The pebbles of the 

 gravel, say they, on Blackheath and the neighbourhood were at 

 the time they wrote abundantly covered with the ova of the Acarus 

 lately described by Mr. White, and formerly considered as a fungus 

 under the name of Craterium pyriforme. Before the late rains 

 these bodies were to be seen on pieces of wood, and many other 

 substances, as the stalks of plants, etc., as well as on the pebbles. 

 They add that they had seen specimens of the same deposit on 



