496 



DIPTEKA 



and Wandolleck has recently made for this and soine allies the 

 new family Stethopathidae. It seems doubtful whether these 

 forms are more than wingless Phoridae. 



Fam. 29. Platypezidae. — Small flies, with 'porrect threc- 

 jointed antennae, first two joints short, third longer, vjith a 

 terminal seta; no bristles on the hack; hind legs of male, or of 

 loth sexes, tvith peculiar, broad, flctt tarsi ; the middle, tibiae bear 

 spurs ; there is no empodium. Platypezidae is a small family 

 of flies, the classification of which has always been a matter of 

 considerable difficulty, and is still uncertain. The larvae are 

 broad and fiat, fringed at the margin with twenty-six spines ; the}' 

 live between the lamellae of Agaric fungi. At pupation the form 

 alters but little ; the imago emerges by a horizontal cleft occurring 

 at the margins of segments two and four.^ We have four genera 

 {Opetia, Platycnema, Platypeza, Callomyict), and nearly a score of 

 species of Platypezidae in our British list, but very little seems to 

 be known about them. There is much difiference in the eyes of 

 the sexes, in some at any rate of the species, they being large and 

 contiguous in the male, but widely separated in the female. 



Fam. 30. Pipunculidae." — Small flies, luith very short antennae 

 bearing a long seta tluU is not terminal ; head cdmost globidar, 

 formed, except at the back, cdmost entirely by the large conjoined 

 eyes ; the head is only slightly smcdler in the femcde, but in 

 the nude the eyes u,re more a^Jproximate at the top. This is 



another of the small fami- 

 lies of flies, that seems dis- 

 tinct from any other, though 

 possessing no very im- 

 portant characters. In many 

 of the flies that have very 

 large eyes, the head is 

 Fig. 238.— Headof PyjKwcK^Mssp. A, Seen from either flattened (i.e. com- 



in front ; B, side view, showing an antenna passed from before back- 

 magnified. Pyrenees. ^ 



wards, as in Ta.banidae, 

 Asilidae), or forced beneath the humped thorax (as in Acro- 

 ceridae), but neither of these conditions exists in Pijmncuhis ; 

 in them the head extends far forwards, so that the area of the 



^ Frauenfeld, Vcrh. Ges. Wien, xx. p. 37, pi. iii. 



2 For monograph of Pipunculidae, see Becker, £erlm. ent. Zeitschr. xlii. 1897 

 pp. 25-100. 



