88 PROCRIS STATIOES. 



the sorrel, and sent him again to the field, where there 

 must have been at that time, as he remarks, hundreds 

 upon hundreds of the larvae ; but this time, after three 

 hours' painful search under every plant of sorrel in the 

 field, he could not find even one, or any trace of one ! 

 JN~o wonder in his next letter Mr. Doubleday wrote, 

 " There is something very mysterious about the larvae 

 of Procris statices." 



My own early experience is not worth much, but I 

 will give it in confirmation of this view of the skill with 

 which the larva hides itself. Early in my collecting 

 days, before I began to keep a note-book, so that I have 

 no date fixed, but believe it to have been in June, 1856, 

 I saw a large number of the perfect insects flying and 

 settling on flowers in a spot which I used to frequent 

 for collecting. I noted that near at hand there was 

 growing almost a carpet of a small species of Rtimex, 

 so more than once, at the season when I understood 

 the larvae should be growing big, I came to this place, 

 and on my hands and knees searched carefully, but I 

 never saw the slightest trace of one having fed on any 

 of the leaves. I know I was very pleased to receive 

 some of Mr. Doubleday's larvae on May 9th, 1866 ; 

 they spun up at the end of the month, and the perfect 

 insects appeared on June 24th and 25th. 



Twenty years later, June 21st, 1886, Mr. Gr. T. Porritt 

 kindly sent me a batch of eggs. The larvae were hatched 

 on June 29th ; for several weeks I kept them in a wide 

 bottle, and watched them feeding on sorrel leaves. At 

 first when they were very small they burrowed into 

 the substance of the leaf, but I did not notice that they 

 were ever quite hidden, and they soon made semi- 

 transparent blotches by eating away one skin, gene- 

 rally, but not always, the under side, and clearing 

 away the inner substance of the leaf, leaving the skin 

 of the other side untouched and quite filmy ; this habit 

 of making blotches in the large leaves they retain to the 

 date of my present writing (15, 10, 86), but they also now 

 apparently eat quite through the whole substance of the 



