136 AVENTIA FLEXULA. 
together, with its legs spread out flat to their full 
extent upon lichens, on which at night it feeds. 
I am indebted to several friends for opportunities 
of studying this species. Mr. Harwood sent me in 
1868 the first I ever saw, which he had beaten either 
from oak or aspen, and then I took it to be a young 
Catocala. The Rev. B. Smith and Mr. W. Machin 
kindly sent me others beaten from lichen-covered 
thorns, cherry, and yew, in the three following years, 
and from one of them I was able to obtain a moth, 
the larva pupating in a folded hawthorn leaf after 
spinning the edges of the leaf closely together. The 
date when this larva was full-grown was May 23rd, 
1871, and the moth appeared June 21st. 
Since the above was written, I append a brief 
mention of a fine example of this larva which Mr. 
Harwood has just sent me:—It is a little over an 
inch in length ; the third sezment 1s tumid, and beyond 
the fourth there is on each of the other segments a 
sheht transverse swelling which bears the hinder pair 
of tubercular warts; it has but few simple filaments, 
all the rest being more or less branched. 
Its colour is brownish ochreous-green, and with 
fewer black marks than usual, for which, in this 
instance, a rather deeper tint of the ground colour is 
substituted. 
This larva, when disturbed on its arrival, walked in 
a position like that of Ophiodes lunaris, as figured by 
Hiibner. (William Buckler, June 11th, 1873; H.M.M., 
July, 1873, X, 42.) 
The pupa is a little over three-eighths of an inch in 
length, and rather stout in proportion ; the head is 
rounded ; the body cylindrical, or of uniform thickness 
to within the three last segments of the abdomen, 
from whence it tapers to the anal point, which ends 
in a diverging group of five rough minute recurved 
bristles. Its colour is pitehy black and shining, the 
segmental divisions of the lower part of the abdomen 
ringed with pinkish-brown. The wing-cases are long 
