39 ° 
The Ohio Naturalist. 
[Vol.IX.No. 1, 
All this led me to make an examination of the various 
Halobatine forms in my collection to find if any other had a 
similar peculiarity, which gave the following result: 
Of 37 winged Trepobatopsis denticornis , Champ., collected by 
Prof. James S. Hine in Guatemala, 11 being males and 26 
females, all have truncate tegmina with ragged edges, showing 
that the membrane has been broken off. 
The thirteen Trepobates pictus collected by me locally in the 
last tw'o summers gave nine individuals with artificially shortened 
wings, five males and four females, including the one that broke 
off its wings in the aquarium and one or two others with the 
wings only partly broken off. The very few winged Rheu- 
matobates rileyi I possess, eight specimens in all, gave seven with 
shortened wings, the males being four and the females three. 
In Telmatometra whitei Bergr., all six types (1 male and 5 females) 
as Dr. Bergroth points out, have the membrane broken off, not 
near, however, but at the basal margin. In all the examples 
before me, the break is at the caudad margin of the corium, 
leaving intact the corial venation. 
In Rhewnatobates , the suture separating the membrane and 
corium appears as a whitish impressed line, or rather, groove, 
which is practically straight and crosses the tegmina from edge 
to edge, just caudad of the termination of the corial venation. 
The figure (1) is from a winged female Rh. tenuipes Mein, from 
Glen Echo, Md., which I owe to the kindness of Mr. O. Heide- 
mann. It is, of course, largely diagrammatic, although drawn 
under the microscope by the aid of a camera lucida. It serves 
to show the general trend a-b , of the suture along w : hich the 
break takes place. This indented line is present in the two 
species known to me in the macropterous form. 
In Trepobates pictus there is a similar suture (Fig. 2, a-b), 
but it differs from that in Rheumatobates in that it does not go all 
the way across the hemelytron, but stops some distance from 
the submarginal vein, in a sort of node (not shown in figure). It 
also has a raised appearance, something in the nature of a 
true vein. 
The hemelytra break off along this suture in both Trepobates 
and Rheumatobates . This is in all likelihood the case with the 
monotypic genera Trepobatopsis (Fig. 4) Champion and Tel¬ 
matometra (Fig 3) Bergroth, but the lack of entire-winged 
specimens does not permit confirmation by actual observation. 
Naturally, there must be some reason for this self-mutilation, 
because, unless it be a survival of some acquired habit once 
necessary in its economy, no insect is given to purposeless acts. 
Two seemingly reasonable explanations suggest themselves, one 
of which is closely associated with the breeding habits of the 
Hemipteron. In the macropterous form of Rheumatobates rileyi, 
