1913] Burr ill, The Giant Midge, Chironomus plumosus. 133 
perhaps all referring to Culicids, as, for example, Dale (1883), 
“countless numbers of flies or gnats, dancing in a partly perpen¬ 
dicular column.” The latter was at 8 p. m., July 14, 1833, in 
Kensington Garden, where unidentified humming gnats formed a 
column two or three feet in diameter and twenty feet high, like 
an inverted J, curved to the east, all gnats in most lively motion. 
Swarms about brightly lighted zvindozvs. —While down town 
I noted that thousands of them were attracted to the brightly 
lighted store windows of Neenah, so that all passersby remarked 
the sight. On the outside of a drug store window a few were 
caught in a bottle, from which the identifications of alcohol mate¬ 
rial were made, the specimens being subsequently so jarred on 
horseback as to be worthless for permanent preservation. At the 
same time many smaller midges appeared on the window panes, 
some colored pale Nile green, others light brown, and even deep 
red, similar to those previously collected on the lake shore at 
Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, 1910, and awaiting identification at 
the Milwaukee Public Museum (discussed in a paper before the 
April 4, 1912, meeting of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences. 
Arts, and Letters, Madison Wis.). 
C. plumosus, hozvever , had by far the majority of individuals 
on the window pane, and being much larger than any of the 
others, was the only one noticed bv the ordinary passerby. Yet 
the numbers of this midge on the windows of the stores was in no 
way comparable with the immense swarms outside the town, de- 
spite that some windows were completely checkered over with 
them. Only the very brightly lighted windows brought them in 
any numbers, and owing to the negatively phototropic observations 
made previously in daylight, I am in doubt what sort of actinic 
effect the electric globe lights had on them. 
Lateness of the Hour of Dancing. —Towards midnight the 
amount of buzzing was greatly lessened although swarms of them 
were still easily visible in the bright»moonlight at distances of a 
100 rods or so, and the pitch of the note remained the same. 
Schuster (1904, 345) notes that the dance was at an end by 
9:30 p. m. 
When we arose in the morning about 5 a. m., we found hun¬ 
dreds of the midges in our shelter tents, hanging all over the un¬ 
derside of the tent canvas. 
