THE ENTOMOLOGIST’S WEEKLY INTELLIGENCER. 
149 
119, 121, 122, also any Nonagria, any 
Cucullia except Umbratica , or any Cato- 
cala except Nupta. Any gentleman 
wishing for the above-mentioned insects 
will please to send a box, as all of mine 
are gone astray. I have also fine dupli- 
cates (just taken) of H. Rubricapraria, 
to which any person in need of them is 
welcome.— David P. Morison, 49, King 
Street, Perth, N.B. ; Jan. 26. 
What there is beneath our Noses. 
— My wish is to draw the attention of all 
and sundry young men who have never 
bethought themselves about the subject 
to the wonders which the roadsides, quiet 
lanes, woods, thickets, moors, or amongst 
whatsoever kind of scenery they may 
chance to be located, would yield them, 
if, instead of frittering away and spending 
their time w-ithout a single thought of 
seeing into Nature, they would only lie 
in her lap for an odd half-hour at a time, 
and recount to themselves a few of the 
many histories which even a couple of 
yards’ square of a grassy bank furnishes. 
I feel convinced that one single experi- 
ment would astonish them at their ig- 
norance. It startled me considerably, 
some few years ago, when I first heard of 
caterpillars taking up their quarters in 
leaves of grass, and that they were to 
be found everywhere for looking after; 
places where I had lain a thousand times, 
either resting after a day’s hunting, or 
thrown myself down upon with a friend 
to enjoy our otium cum dig., being 
tenanted by scores of larvae mining and 
w'orking out an existence in such narrow 
houses ; yet there they are sure enough, 
and abundant proofs have been shown 
establishing this fact. Broad -leaved 
grasses or narrow ones, even like a hair 
may, on a little examination, be detected 
occupied by a creature worming its way 
down between the skins, and in some 
cases so large (as in Elachista cygnipen- 
nella ) that one almost fancies they stretch 
the grass considerably to find room for 
their bodies. There is no mistaking 
them when once seen, nor do their jaws 
ever seem to rest. Take a grass so 
tenanted, mark it at the place where the 
larva is, leave it for a couple of hours or 
so, and then go back and see the pro- 
gress. Had it been working for a wager, 
or doing it at so much per yard, it could 
not have got on faster. Commercial 
crises don’t affect them as they do us 
poor creatures, and out in their natural 
state they never get put on half-time, 
although they are to be found upon short 
(grass) commons as abundantly as any- 
where else. The Great Master gives 
them a piece of work to do and they do 
it, whether it be to work out the natural 
transformations of the creature itself, or 
as a body on which battens the parasite 
in its earlier stages. Some of them show 
a decided partiality for a single kind of 
grass, while others go in wholesale, and 
the larva of the same species is to be 
found in several kinds. E. albifrontella 
has about as wide a range as any I know, 
and zonariella seems as fondly attached 
to the rough hair-grass (Aira ccespitosa). 
Adscitella, too, has a peculiar liking for 
the blue moor-grass ( Sesleria ceerulea ), 
for, although plenty of other grasses grow 
amongst and beside this one, where I find 
the creature by scores, yet 1 never found 
it in any other. Each has also its own 
peculiar manner of working : some merely 
cut out a channel large enough to allow 
the body to pass down, and others mine 
the whole width of the leaf. The mine 
of one larva assumes a pinkish tinge, of 
another brown, and that of adscitella is 
nearly white, and these are the stepping- 
stones towards the discrimination, at first 
sight, of the different species of larvae. 
Some never venture into the stem, others 
do, the depths of their proceedings being 
only checked by the roots themselves. — 
John Scott, in the '■Zoologist’ for 
February. 
