2552 Insects. 



evening, feeding on the young shoots, or crawling up evidently with that intention. 

 This opinion was not founded on a single specimen, for the number captured by my- 

 self and Mr. F. V. Jacques (forty specimens) was, I think, sufficient to give us a good 

 chance of observation. — Stephen Barton; Maudlin Street, Bristol, July 10, 1849. 



Capture of rare Coleoptera, some of them new to Britain. — Having brought my 

 spring entomological compaign to the close, I send you an account of some of my 

 principal captures. The weather having been remarkably mild during the month of 

 February, and the first half of March, I was rather successful in taking several good 

 species of Coleoptera, even in that early season, in the neighbourhood of Ramsgate, 

 where I was then residing. The country around that place, however, is ill-suited to 

 the labours of the practical entomologist, being almost entirely arable, and under a 

 high state of cultivation, and being held by the tenants at rack-rent, is far too 

 valuable to admit of any portion of it being allowed to lie waste. There are no woods 

 and very few trees — neither hedges nor flowery lanes, nor meadows, nor streams of 

 water — the very cliffs themselves are perpendicular, and the tide washes their base, 

 so that altogether it is as unpromising a locality for the Coleopterist, as well can be. 

 The only spot that is at all productive of anything (and even that, from the nature of 

 the soil, and other causes, is not very promising) is at Pegwell Bay, two miles from the 

 town. There the chalk cliffs terminate, and are succeeded by a broken and rugged 

 tract of ground, extending for merely a few hundred yards, which slopes toward the 

 beach, and is clad with course herbage and dotted with thorn bushes, and in the 

 summer adorned with a profusion of the plants of the common fennel, the last year's 

 stumps only of which were visible at the period in question. Here I took during 

 several visits which I was tempted to pay to the locality, a fine series of Trachyphlaeus 

 spinimanus and alternans in company with squamulatus and the common scabriculus. 

 I found them in little bare places, where, lying quite motionless, they could hardly be 

 distinguished from the small particles of earth, which they exactly resembled in colour. 

 Here I took beneath the thorn bushes, lying torpid at the roots of the stunted herbage, 

 about half-a-dozen specimens or more of Otiorhynchus raucus — a very slow and diffi- 

 cult method of procuring them, though at a subsequent period, when the bushes were 

 in leaf, neither beating the bushes nor sweeping the herbage produced me a single spe- 

 cimen. From under a stump of one of these thorn bushes, a solitary Plinthus caligi- 

 nosus was dug out by my son, and prematurely roused from his wintry and dark 

 slumber to see the light of the sun, and lose sight of it for ever. On these slopes I 

 also captured Dromius truncatellus and fasciatus ; Agonum 6-punctatum ; Meloe 

 brevicollis and cicatricosus, the latter in considerable numbers. From other quarters 

 I subsequently procured Meloe variegatus, but I have nothing to add respecting its 

 natural habitat, beyond what is already known — ' found at Newgate, near Margate, 

 and on both sides of the North Foreland, under sea-weed, in cart-ruts leading to, and 

 on the beach' — we can hardly in this account recognise any legitimate habitat. I am 

 disposed to believe that they were carried thither by the tide from some other locality ; 

 most of the examples brought to me had been washed by the sea-water. But to 

 return to Pegwell Bay. Under rejectamenta in sandy spots (which are very few and 

 limited in extent), I took Omaseus anthracinus, Carabns consitus (1 specimen), 

 Lopha Mannerheimii (in profusion), and the very rare Trechus atratus, Sec. This 

 species has only occurred in England on two previous occasions. It was taken by 

 Mr. S. Stevens on Bury Hill slopes near Arundel, and on the supposition that it was 

 an undescribed species, was named by Mr. Wuterhouse, Trcchus nigrinus ; it occurs, 



