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THE YOUNG NATURALIST. 



for traces of its larva unsuccessfully, I turned to plum trees, without result ; 

 as a last resort I tried pear trees, and upon the last one I examined (a tall 

 tree 25 feet high), I thought I could see something ten or twelve feet above 

 the ground, so got a ladder, and for five or six feet above the first seen traces, 

 the bark was covered with small patches of frass, through which were scores 

 of pupa-cases projecting outwards. The enigma of finding specimens of S. 

 woeberana in my room was solved, as from one of the pupa-cases a fine speci- 

 men of the moth was just emerging. Taking my ladder to another tree I 

 found a few frass marks high up, and two moths sitting on the underside of 

 the lower branches. This sent me back to the first tree to examine the lower 

 branches upon it, again I found more perfect specimens. In practice 1 found 

 them so difficult to box, sitting, or to net flying amongst the branches, as I 

 stood upon the ladder, that I decided to saw a number of the lower branches- 

 off, and so bred them out indoors. This proved quite a success, as did dig- 

 ging the pupa out where frass shewed itself without any pupa-case shewing: 

 upon the trunks of the trees. The principal tree for them is a " Maria Louise," 

 which I planted forty years ago, the other a Jargonelle of the same age was 

 only slightly attacked, whilst four other sorts of pears and the apple and plum 

 trees in the garden — all of the same age, but not from the same nursery 

 originally — have had no larvse upon them up to now, yet these larvae must have 

 been imported with the trees forty years ago, and have reproduced their 

 species over all that time in my garden, under my nose, and I never saw them 

 before. Truly, how little individually we know. 



Note. — In all books to which I have access this species in given as an 

 apple or plum feeder. In Westwood and Humphry's " British Moths," PI. 86. 

 Kg. 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, it is figured fully but crudely, and described as feed- 

 ing "beneath plum bark which it loosens and injures the tree," and again 

 "Mr. Spence found it in apple orchards." Other writers (compilers) have 

 • copied this. I have repeatedly read it, so never examined pear trees for the 

 species, and it seems a little strange to me now that after forty years, in a small 

 garden like mine, with apple, plum and other sorts of pear trees growing close 

 around, they have never gone to live upon them, but remain numerously upon 

 the imported trees they must have been imported in or upon. — C. S. Greg- 

 son, Eose Bank, Fletcher Grove, Liverpool. 



Sirex Juvencus at Oldham. — I have a pair of the above species in my 

 collection, taken by my son last July, in a cotton mill where he works. It 

 is supposed they have been brought there with a quantity of timber they have 

 stored in the warehouses, which they use at the bottom of skips, commonly 

 called " skips-clogs." — J. T. Eodgers, Oldham. 



