692 The American Naturalıst. [July, 
watched it through a warm June night will not wonder that the natu- 
ralist, like Mr. Silas Wegg, may be tempted to ‘‘ drop into werse."' 
No prose can perfectly represent the mazy evolutions of its flight, but 
the following from the pen of Mr. Philip Gosse will be found the most 
accurate : “ They fly slowly, and as they fly, emit and conceal their 
Aight at intervals of two or three seconds ; making interrupted lines of 
light through the air, gleaming slowly along for about a yard, then 
suddenly quenched, and appearing again at the same distance ahead.’’ 
He, like Longfellow, compares the light to candles in the woods. In- 
deed he says though told what they were, at every one that appeared, 
the same idea would come across his mind, but the comparison is not 
so apt with us, for we rarely see them singly, and it rather seems as if 
they were stars moving through the bushes, or twinkling in some deep 
valley as we look into it from the hillsabove. ‘They resemble thestars, 
too, in the thought of infinite number they suggest. It would be a 
hopeless task to count the number one can see in a single summer 
night. And considering the countless summer nighis that have elapsed 
since the first firefly appeared on the globe (fossil Lampyrid are found 
in Miocene rocks) the total of all the motions that they have made 
since then may well suggest a number approaching to mathematical 
infinity. 
Apart from their beauty, our fireflies possess a great interest from the 
entomologist’s point of view, for we find in them some characters spe- 
- cialized to an extraordinary extent. It is unfortunate that among the 
nine or ten species represented on Staten Island, of which I append a 
descriptive list, the special sexual characters are not developed as fully 
as in the Southern species and in the English “ glow worm." . In the 
latter, the light organs of the female reach their highest point and she 
is destitute of wings, while the male possesses normal wing power and 
very large eyes; clearly indicating the relation of the characters to the 
reproduction of the species. The light organs of the male are feeble, 
being useless as an attraction to the female, able only to crawl slowly 
in the grass. The same characters are found in some of our Texan 
species, but the only approach to it among the Staten Island species is 
in Photinus scintillans, our most abundant **firefly," of which the 
. female is wingless. The eyes, however, and the light organs are 
equally developed in each sex. 
The antennz also present some curious forms, none more so than 
those of Phengodes plumosa, a southern species whose occurence on 
Staten Island was discovered by Mr. W. T. Davis, to whom I am 
indebted for my specimen. Here the antennz consist as usual of 
