232 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



no way appeared to me to differ from those of Culex pipiens, except 

 that they were very large, about 10 mm. long. I took about two 

 dozen or so of these larvae home, which I confined in a vessel of 

 water. I thought at the time the early date was very much against 

 their being those of G. pipiens. All works on entomology I consulted 

 were unanimous in deciding that the breeding of this insect was in 

 early summer. The larvae I had gradually diminished in numbers, 

 one by one, and disappeared. Query : Were the rest guilty of canni- 

 balism '? The remaining larvae turned into nymphs on May 18th, 

 and the perfect insect appeared on May 20th. This unusually long 

 period from larva to imago struck me as curious, so I sent to Mr. 

 Austen of the British Museum a tube containing larva, nymph, and 

 fly in spirit. He very kindly supplied me with the following infor- 

 mation : — " I write to say that the Mosquito larvae and-pupae are not 

 those of Culex pipiens, but belong to the species known as Culex 

 vexans (Meigen), about which our knowledge is as yet very scanty. 

 Mr. C. 0. Waterhouse found the larvae of this species in a large pond 

 at Brockenhurst, in the New Forest, at the end of March 22nd, 

 1905, so that March 22nd would not appear to be an unusually early 

 date for the larvae ; but whether the species passes through the 

 winter in the larval state I am unable to say. Curiously enough, all 

 the perfect insects bred by Mr. Waterhouse are males [mine were 

 also males] , and apparently he failed to breed a single female. If 

 you are ever able to obtain females of C. vexans, I should be glad of a 

 few specimens for our Collection. They should either be pinned on 

 fine pins, or, if dead, sent dry in a tube containing a few pieces of 

 cigarette or tissue paper in order to prevent the specimens from 

 being injured by shaking about. Your specimens certainly seem to 

 have been an unusually long time in reaching the perfect state ; this 

 was perhaps due to the lack of some necessary food material in the 

 water." (My specimens had pond water supplied to them.) It is 

 perhaps worth while to mention that last year I took here numbers 

 of another "New Forest insect," namely, Osmylus fulvicephalus , 

 which I sent to Mr. Kirby for the National Collection. Mr. Water- 

 house, in acknowledging these specimens, wrote to me that he had 

 only met with it in the New Forest, " but it is not a common one, 

 or at any rate it is very local." In 1908 I saw numbers of these 

 insects at Watersmeet, in North Devon. — Gordon Dalgliesh (The 

 Cottage, Brook, Godalming, Surrey). 



