428 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



octomaculata, members of an allied tribe, whose caterpillars 

 destroy the grape-vines, and he felt confident that on both 

 occasions he detected the clubbed antennae playing the tattoo 

 on the wings like drum-sticks. An idea here arises whether 

 the talc spots on the wings of certain large falcate winged 

 moths are not adapted to produce a social buzz ; a school- 

 boy once told me he had made his kite buzz, but then he 

 had cut a hole in it. Many stout-bodied moths whose cater- 

 pillars are cocoon -spinners, when they desire a partner, com- 

 mence a vigorous wing-beating ; the same rattle is heard when 

 they are pumping in air to inflate their bodies for flight. 



The "green silver lines " must be of lineage old, for their 

 caterpillars construct the boat-shaped cocoons of the species of 

 Nola, by some placed in the Lithosiidce, as do those of some 

 green moths which resemble the Tortricina in appearance. 

 Forms that link the Tortricina, Pyralidina, and Bombycina 

 are naturally ancestral ; in one of the table-cases of the Mar- 

 seilles Museum a tertiary moth with banded wings was to be 

 seen. The fore wings of Hylophila prasinana have a sonorous 

 pucker and a flap with a callosity that catches on the side-piece 

 of the abdomen with a click, but as the moth executes its 

 " scritch-scritch!" when flying, it would seem as if the callosity 

 caught at the root of the veins of the hind wing. Mr. Kirby 

 says this inhabitant of the oak-wood is common in Europe and 

 Siberia. A specimen possessed by the British Museum used to 

 be labelled "Australia." Some years the beating-stick brings 

 it down plentifully in the New Forest, but as far as I know its 

 twitter or squeak has only been heard in the north of our island. 

 The Kev. Mr. Morris saw a large shoal of these moths flying and 

 squeaking above the top of an old-fashioned hedge in a grassy 

 lane at Stoke Court, and those seen by Mr. Headworth on June 

 4th in a wood at Gateshead, in Durham, were whirling franti- 

 cally around one another in a waltz with a reiterated bird-like 

 twitter, and a male that was captured squeaked on in delight 

 until it was boxed. Dr. Buchanan White, on May 28th, heard 

 a solitary male disconsolately squeaking as it gyrated around a 

 small oak in Perthshire, and another later the same evening doing 

 likewise, which looks as if there were a newly emerged female 

 embowered in the silence. Those I saw come fluttering down in 



