THE YOUNG NATURALIST. 



hybrids ? Out of the number I have taken, I never had but two specimens 

 that I could not satisfactorily determine at a glance. I cannot agree with 

 my friend Mr. S. Webb, that the drainage of the ground by the cutting of 

 railway through the New Forest may have produced this change of trifolii 

 into meliloti-, and there is no proof that meliloti had not existed here for 

 years. It may well have been passed over as a small form of trifolii, and 

 looked upon by collectors as too common to take any trouble with. See how 

 many years Nolo, centonalis was passed over, until I discovered it at Deal, in 

 1878. Harding a good collector, and a resident at Deal, must have walked 

 over it hundreds of times, and so do many other species get overlooked. 

 I have had considerable experience in collecting in the locality, and cannot 

 admit that any such change has occurred. The whole of the district has 

 plenty of wet spots, and the food-plant is abundant and luxuriant on all sides. 

 Meliloti occurs, or did occur, over a fairly wide locality, viz. : from the top 

 ride (just outside Ramnor), through all the upper rides of Park-hill enclosure ; 

 the ride on the Denny side of Stubby Copses, Perrywood Heath ; and by the 

 rides running parallel to the railway, &c, &c. Most of the ground is high, 

 and not at all likely to be influenced by the slight cutting of this line ; 

 plenty of wet spots exist, if such had been at all necessary for the welfare of 

 the species, which I much doubt. My experience of Z. trifolii, is that it 

 affects open meadows often in very arid spots, although I know a locality at 

 Freshwater, in the Isle of Wight, where Z. trifolii occurs freely in a wet 

 meadow with a boggy corner, and here it runs very large, deeply coloured 

 and often has coalescent spots ; curiously, here the insect was three weeks later 

 than in the New Forest. Then the whole of this district is well wooded and 

 plants luxuriant, it cannot be classed with the burnt-up herbage of the chalk 

 downs, that produce the pigmy form of Lycczna corydon, at Dover, &c. It 

 is in no way a parallel case, on the burnt-up chalk downs, one can easily 

 believe that the plant life would be dried up and dwarfed, consequently likely 

 to induce a stunted form of insect life feeding in such a locality. But to 

 look round you in the New Forest, and see there nature in its most luxuriant 

 growth, one cannot accept Mr. Webb's hypothesis, and if meliloti is only a 

 var. the cause cannot be want of food from draining its haunts Mr. Brigg has 

 several times bred, or at anyrate attempted to breed, this insect from ova, from 

 the Forest, and I know he has on one occasion bred imagines from these ova, 

 in a heated greenhouse, of a form, nearly, if not quite like trifolii, but as 1 

 read him, he is not quite certain that the form meliloti had not previously 

 copulated with trifolii, at anyrate he was not convinced that he had settled 

 the doubt. Under any condition, the New Forest insect has such evident 

 differences from normal trifolii, that it is desirable for it to be a named form, 



