Kew : Lincolnshire Pseudoscorpions. 



*95 



numbers in a deserted sparrow's nest in ivy on the groom's 

 cottage adjoining his garden at Kirton-in-Lindsey. 



II. 



It was in September last that I received from Louth, through 

 the kindness of Mr. Larder, the above noted specimen of Chernes 

 nodosus, together with the fly to which it was attached. His 

 brother saw the fly on the wing in a warehouse in Mercer Row, 

 observed that it was carrying an unusual object through the air, 

 caught it, and found the object to be a Pseudoscorpion, clinging 

 by closure of the pincers of one of the great pedipalps to one of 

 the legs of the fly. On the following day another fly similarly 

 encumbered was observed on the wing in the same warehouse. 

 The questions involved in these observations are of considerable 

 interest ; but the subject is by no means new, and it has already 

 been referred to in 'The Naturalist' itself, Mr. Cambridge 

 having noted, in the volume for 1884-5, two cases of the attach- 

 ment to flies of this same Chernes nodosns. One specimen was 

 received from Mr. Meade, of Bradford ; and the other from 

 Mr. Roebuck with a note that it had been taken at Bradford by 

 Mr. W. West attached to the leg of a house-fly.*" 



Poda, one hundred and forty years ago, made a reference to 

 the subject, noting of a Pseudoscorpion supposed by him to be 

 the Linnean Acarus cancroides : Repertus in pedibus muscce, 

 quos chelis suis firmissime apprehendit ; f and in 1787 George 

 Adams recorded the finding by Mr. Marsham of one of these 

 'lobster insects' 'firmly fixed by its claws to the thighs of a 

 large fly, which he caught on a flower in Essex the first week in 

 August, and from which he could not disengage it without great 

 difficulty, and tearing off the fly's leg.' { Hermann, in 1804, 

 figured his Chelifer parasita, noting that it was found adhering 

 to a fly. || The next available item appeared in 1831 in Loudon's 

 ' Magazine of Natural History' : 



A LOBSTER-LIKE INSECT ATTACKING THE LEG OF A HO USE-FLY. — As 

 I was yesterday reading in the parlour, my attention was accidentally 

 attracted to a common house-fly, which was chafing its fore-leg\s in a very 

 unusual way. On closer examination, 1 found, to my surprise, that a small 

 insect was firmly attached to one of its legs, which the flv was ineffectually 

 endeavouring' to dislodge. On applying" a magnifying glass, my surprise 

 was greatly increased by finding- that the insect which had seized the fly's 



* O. P. -Cambridge, Naturalist, 1884-5, P- 10 3- 



I X. Poda, ' Insecta Musei Grsecensis,' 1761, p. 122. 

 £G. Adams, 4 Essays on the Microscope,' 17S7, p. 386. 



II J. F. Hermann, ' Memoire apterologique,' 1S04, p. 117. 



1O01 July a. 



