THE YOUNG NATUEALIST. 



155 



NATURE IN AUGUST. 



By ALBERT H. WATERS, B.A. 



" Summer suns are glowing 



Over land and sea, 

 Happy light is flowing 

 Beautiful and free ! 



Bishop Walsham How. 



With a hot summer sun shining overhead, we start on a bright August 



morning on a naturalising ramble. Nature now is very cheerful in aspect, 



although withal a trifle dusty. 



Butterflies* of every hue 

 Purple, yellow, crimson, blue, 



are conspicuous features, and we see many fluttering about the road-side 



hedges. We will, however, leave the dusty road as soon as we possibly can, 



and take a ramble by the banks of the clear stream we see flowing through 



the meadows, on its way to the sea. 



We will again turn our attention to the dragonflies we see in such numbers. 



There goes a very fine one. Ha ! we have him. We see at once it is an 

 JEJsckna, and from the red brown tint of the clear semi-transparent wings, and 

 the two yellow bands we notice on the sides of the red brown thorax, and the 

 absence of markings in front, we feel sure it is the generally distributed 

 JEschna grandis. Besides the yellow bands on the sides of the thorax, we 

 see there are two oblique yellow . stripes and two blue spots, immediately 

 following four blue spots at the base of the wings. 



Here is a larger specimen, and we see it differs in several respects from 

 JE. grandis* The wings in the first place are perfectly clear, and the ptero- 

 stigma black instead of red as in the other. We see blue spots on the sides 

 of the abdomen and other blue dorsal spots near the apex, while every seg- 

 ment as far as the seventh has two green spots on the back. From the just 

 mentioned blue spots we infer our specimen is a male, as in the female all the 

 spots are yellow green. Besides these spots we see two large oval shaped 

 ones of a yellow green colour, on the front of the brown thorax, and we also 

 notice that the sides of the body are yellow green, divided by dark lines. 

 From these characters we recognise our specimen as JEschna cyanea. 



Another large species, of AZschna is AZ.juncea, but it is less common than 

 the ones just mentioned, although I believe it is pretty generally distributed. 

 Like cyanea it has clear wings, the pterostigma in the male is black, but 

 inclined to ochreous in the female. The male has the thorax blacker than 

 the female ; in the latter it is inclined to brown, and in both sexes there are 

 two straight, or nearly straight yellow stripes in front. In the male insect 



