138 
ZOOLOGY: L. 0. HOWARD 
Proc. N. a. S. 
over the whole gipsy moth territory in the United States but is found in 
some cases twenty miles beyond the line of gipsy moth spread. 
I confess that I anticipate great benefits in this same broad way from 
Apanteles lacteicolor since it apparently attacks not only hairy caterpillars 
but naked caterpillars. 
Of late the Bureau of Entomology has been introducing from south 
Europe the parasites of the imported European corn borer. Although it 
is too early to state positively that any of these imported parasites have 
been established, an important parasite known as Habrobracon brevicornis, 
found last summer in a region of south France near Hyeres, has been 
brought over in very considerable numbers and has been reared in the 
laboratory with the utmost ease and some thousands have been liberated. 
It manages to lay its eggs in the larva of the borer while in the cornstalk, 
and, as it happens that we have a native cornstalk borer which is especially 
prevalent in the southeastern United States, we have experimented in the 
laboratory at Arlington, Massachusetts, with the latter species, and 
find that the European parasite takes to it readily and should become, if 
we can establish it, an important parasite of the southern corn pest. This 
work was done on the initiative of and under the direction of Mr. W. R. 
Walton. 
Further than this, there exists a Lepidopterous borer in the sugar cane 
in Louisiana which is closely allied to the corn stalk-borer of the southern 
States and which will with little question be parasitized by this European 
parasite when they are once brought together. Inasmuch as the Ha- 
brobracon normally inhabits the Mediterranean littoral, it is altogether 
likely that it will accommodate itself to the climate of the Gulf of Mexico 
littoral more readily than it will the harsher climate of New England and 
New York. The experiment has actually been begun and it is found that 
the European parasite breeds freely in confinement at New Orleans on the 
sugar-cane borer. It is planned to liberate large numbers the present 
season on an isolated infested plantation in Louisana. We have strong 
hopes of its successful establishment. 
The evolution of parasitism with insects is an interesting study. As 
in so many other directions in biological studies, we can trace the course 
of probable evolution by different stages which exist at the present time. 
The very catholic methods of the Tachinid fly listed above, which lays its 
eggs not only on all sorts of caterpillars, whether hairy or naked or large 
or small, but will even oviposit on the caterpillar-like sawfly larvae, and 
even upon a weevil grub in one instance (not, however, as yet fully veri- 
fied), indicate rather surely that the parasitic habit has more recently 
become adopted with the Tachinids than with very many of the parasitic 
Hymenoptera. 
But with the Hymenoptera we have all stages in the evolution, from 
