8358 



Insects. 



Easily distinguished by the smooth, polished disk and the pale colour 

 of the anterior wings. The frontal tuft is bright rusty yellow, the cer- 

 vical tuft and eye-caps are yellowish white ; the antennae and legs are 

 pale gray ; the middle legs hardly paler ; the tarsi yellowish white. 

 The anterior wings are very smooth, as though polished, with bright 

 metallic gloss ; their colour is a greenish brassy yellow, which is palest 

 beyond the middle and at the tip 4 though to a trifling extent, and 

 deepens at the base of the cilia to a very pale brown ; the tips of the 

 cilia are pale brownish gray, and the posterior wings with their cilia 

 are of the same colour. 



I took a beautiful fresh female at Brunswick, on the trunk of a beech 

 tree, in May. 



6. N. BASIGUTTELLA. 



Capillis atris, penicillis et antennarum conchula albidis, thorace 

 atro ; alis anterioribus subnitidis, violaceo-aeneis, basi flavidis, 

 apice violaceo-purpureis, ciliis fusco-griseis. Exp. al. 2^- — 2^ 

 lin. 



This species is very like N. Tiliae, but larger and stouter : it is dis- 

 tinguished from that and from the remaining black-headed Nepticulae 

 which have no fasciae by the pale basal spot of the anterior wings and 

 the black thorax ; from most of them also by the rusty yellow lower 

 part of the face, and by the much paler silver-gray colour of the legs 

 and the belly. The vertical tuft is black, the lower part of the face 

 rusty yellow, or divided lengthwise by a rusty yellow line ; the eye- 

 caps are large in both sexes, and like the cervical tuft and palpi are 

 white or yellowish white ; the antennae are shining silvery gray, thickly 

 annulated with darker, reaching in the males along two-thirds of the 

 costa of the anterior wings ; the thorax, with the tippets, is deep black 

 to the paler part of the metathorax, which is especially striking before 

 the creature is pinned ; the abdomen is blackish gray, with rusty yellow 

 tip in the male ; the under side of the body and the legs are pale 

 silvery gray, the latter rather darker externally. The anterior wings 

 have the ground colour of a very pale, almost whitish, shining bronze, 

 but this is darkened and clouded by the more or less broad brownish 

 violet tips of the scales. The clearest and palest part is the base, where 

 the light ground colour forms a small, not sharply bordered, yellowish 

 white spot, immediately beyond which the scales are most uniformly 

 darkened ; they become again gradually paler in the middle of the 

 wing, especially at the inner margin, wdiere, again, an undefined pale 

 place, free from dark scales, occurs at the anal angle, which sometimes 



