SERPHOID AND CHALCIDOID PARASITES OF THE HESSIAN ELY 13 



P. zosine he simply stated that specimens emerged in March from a 

 fly puparium which had been isolated the previous August. Speci- 

 mens of the supposed P. minutus from France were sent by Marchal 

 to J. J. Kieffer, who in 1906 stated that they were not minutus of 

 Lindeman and proceeded to describe two species from the material, 

 one of which he called PJatygaster longicwudatus and the other P. 

 brevicaudatus. Kieffer subsequently, in 1926, synonymized the last- 

 named species with longicaudatus. 



The present writer has examined not only the material in the 

 United States National Museum collection retained by Ashmead 

 from Marchal's original sending but also all of that material still 

 in existence which Ashmead returned to Marchal, these last-men- 

 tioned specimens having been obtained from Dr. Marchal through 

 L. O. Howard before his retirement from the Bureau of Entomology. 

 These comprise the actual specimens upon which the Ashmead and 

 Marchal papers were based. Also it should be noted that the types 

 of longicaudatus Kieffer and brevicaudatus Kieffer, while not in- 

 cluded in the material examined by the present writer, nevertheless 

 were actually a part of the same lot of specimens reared by Marchal 

 and named by Ashmead. 



Careful study of this material has failed to disclose any difference 

 between the specimens identified by Ashmead as P. minutus and those 

 identified as P. zosine. Furthermore, it is quite certain that the true 

 minutus of Lindeman was not represented in Marchal's rearings. As 

 has been shown elsewhere, the true minutus is identical with P. 

 Merrmlis Forbes, a species quite distinct from the one at present 

 under consideration. Kieffer recognized that Marchal's specimens 

 were not minutus Lindeman, and he considered them to represent a 

 species different also from zosine Walker. While he proposed the 

 new name longicaudatus for minutus Ashmead and Marchal, not 

 Lindeman, he at the same time repeated the record of zosine as a 

 parasite of Phytophaga destructor and Mayetiola avenae. It ap- 

 pears certain, however, that Kieffer saw none of the Marchal mate- 

 rial which had been identified as zosine by Ashmead, and it is almost 

 equally certain that zosine was unknown to him by specimens, since 

 his description of the species is simply a free translation of Walker's 

 original description. His failure to recognize his species longi- 

 caudatus as the same as zosine was no doubt due to a misunderstand- 

 ing of Walker's description. 



Myers recognized that his species vernalis, described from America 

 in 1917, was identical with the specimens from France misidentified 

 as minutus by Ashmead and also that it might prove to be identical 

 with zosine, but because of the incompleteness of Walker's description 

 he did not consider it safe to identify it as zosine. Myers apparently 

 was unaware of Kieffer's description of longicaudatus. 



The writer has compared the specimens from France with types 

 of vernalis Myers and cannot distinguish them in any way. The 

 biology of the European form as worked out by Marchal seems to 

 correspond with that of vernalis, as Hill has stated in his account of 

 the development of P. Memalis, published in 1926. It therefore 

 appears certain that these two forms are the same and the species 

 should be known as Platygaster zosine Walker. 



