3810 Insects. 



exhibited *.' a specimen of Polia nebuloea, from the left eye of which a fungus-like 

 excrescence had been produced, of a slender filiform appearance at the base, but bifid 

 and clavate at the tip ; it was about the length of the head. The moth had been taken 

 alive with this excrescence attached to it, by Mr. Shipman." At the following meet- 

 ing Mr. Ingpen stated, that "this supposed fungus had been examined by Mr. 

 Sowerbv, who ascertained it to be the anther of a species of Ophrys, which had become 

 accidentally attached to the eye.'' In the course of my collecting I have several 

 times seen similar attachments to the heads of Lepidoptera, and have considered them 

 to be, as in the above instance, parts of flowers to which the insects had been attracted, 

 and which had accidentally adhered to them. The examples mentioned by Mr. 

 Hogan I should think referrible to the same cause. — /. W. Douglas ; Lee, Kent, Fe- 

 bruary 7, 1853. 



Duplicates of Lepidoptera. — I have duplicate specimens of Depressaria pallorella, 

 D. rotundella, D. Alstrcemeriana, and D. Ulicitella, which I shall be happy to give to 

 any entomologist who may be in want of those species. — Thomas Boyd ; 17, Clapton 

 Square, December 13, 1852. 



Myrmica domestica. — Mr. Daniell's paper on the Myrmica domestica of Shuckard, 

 printed in your last number (Zool. 3769), from the Linnean ' Proceedings,' I heard 

 read at that Society ; but it did not then occur to me to ask if anybody had ever seen 

 the male and female of this ant with their wings ; for of course, like the rest of their 

 congeners, they appear at pairing time with these aerial appendages. The lower part 

 of this house is much infested by these little plagues, indeed to such an extent as to 

 make it almost impossible to keep preserves et id genus omne below. Their head 

 quarters are the neighbourhood of the kitchen fire and the oven, where a stream of 

 them may be observed at almost any time from January to December. I have watched 

 them closely, but have never been able to detect them in the winged state. When 

 the ants of the woods and gardens escape from their guards at pairing time, their de- 

 parture is accompanied with such a hubbub and confusion as to arrest the attention 

 of the most incurious ; and from analogous reasoning, when the males and females 

 of the ant in question leave their nests, you would expect the house to be swarming 

 with them. Their nests are evidently in the foundation of the houses, which makes 

 it almost impossible to extirpate them. I have tried various methods, but all without 

 effect. Soft soap pressed into the crevices to which they may be traced appears to 

 be of some service, but it probably only drives them to some other locality. It has 

 been thought that the Regent's Park and its neighbourhood are the only places where 

 this ant is found, and that they were imported into this country with the timber con- 

 tained in the houses ; but years since (in 1846), I saw them in thousands in one of 

 the principal hotels at Winchester, the cups and saucers, and even the teapot came up 

 swarming with them. Twenty years ago a house in Upper Bedford Place, then occu- 

 pied by the late Dr. Bostock, was scarcely habitable in consequence of the myriads of 

 these diminutive plagues. The Doctor took infinite pains to remedy the evil, and 

 literally had cart-loads of earth removed from below the kitchen and cellars but with- 

 out much abating the nuisance ; and the ants, like Virgil's harpies — 



" Diripiuntque dapes, contactuque omnia fcedant 

 Immuudo.'' 



You, or some of your correspondents may have seen these ants in their winged 



