66 
MEETINGS OF SECTIONS. 
ENTOMOLOGICAL SECTION- 
Sept. 8th, 1868.— Mr. S. Batiton, M.E.S., President, in the Chair. 
Mr. Edwfn C. Reed, formerly Hon. Secretary of the Section, who has 
recently returned from Bahia, was present, and gave an interesting account 
of the Entomology of the Brazils. 
Mr. Reed stated that he had been very unfortunate in selecting Bahia as 
a collecting ground, but he was induced to do so for several reasons ; chiefly, 
however, because it was equi-distant from Para on the one hand and 
Rio de Janeiro on the other, from which places most of the principal 
Brazilian collections had been obtained. 
In choosing an intermediate station, he hoped to find numerous examples 
of many genera sparingly represented at those places ; for instance of the 
genus Agra, belonging to the Geodephaga, many species of which occur on 
the Amazon and several at Rio. Such proved not to be the case, however, 
for he had found but six species at Bahia during three years' collecting. 
Again, Mr. Bates records the capture of many species of Papilio in a day 
on the Amazon ; he, Mr. Reed, found only five during his stay at Bahia. The 
genus Haliconia, so strongly represented on the Amazon, likewise yielded 
only some six species at Bahia. Ants, however, he found to be very 
numerous, so much so as to entail a serious loss on the coffee and cocoa 
planters. One species, called in Portuguese " Formiga da mandioc, " strips 
small trees of their leaves in a few minutes. This ant, he observed, was no 
where more abundant than in the City of Bahia, in many of the suburbs of 
which it is impossible to cultivate even a small garden, as a midnight visit 
from this fierce marauder will reduce a pretty garden to a mass of leafless stumps 
and twigs. It was, said Mr. Reed, an interesting sight to see these ants at 
work, some cutting off the leaves and letting them fall to the ground, where 
hundreds are ready to cut them up and carry them off ; hundreds more 
running up and down the trunk, those passing down always carrying bits of 
leaf in their mouths. Wherever they travel regularly, a road about six 
inches wide, and worn quite smooth, is to be seen. 
A good sized nest of this species will cover a piece of ground from fifty to 
a hundred yards in diameter. Among the ants are found many stinging, or 
rather biting species, the bites from which are very painful. One, the fire- 
