894 
Annual Report of New York 
TBLLOW AND RED-LINED LEAP-HOPPERS. THEIR CLOSE RELATIONSHIP 
insect. He had before him but a single specimen of the former 
and probably a few only of the latter. In 1851 when my Catalogue 
of the Homopterous Insects in the Stale Cabinet of Natural His¬ 
tory was published I had met with only two of the Red-lined spe¬ 
cies but had gathered as many as I desired of the others. Their 
colors were so widely different and were so constant in every 
instance—the yellow-lined ones being of both sexes, and no part of 
any one of the multitude of examples which I inspected presenting 
any tinge of red to indicate to me that the two colors might gradu¬ 
ally pass into each other—that I did not hesitate to regard them 
as being specifically distinct, and treated them accordingly. But as 
Mr. Say indicates no doubt of his correctness, I could not divest 
myself of the suspicion that he had seen some instance in which the 
stripes were partly red and partly yellow, or so colored otherwise 
as to be intermediate between the two extremes. Years passed 
away, and I continued to collect numbers of the Yellow-lined insects 
without meeting with any example to shake my confidence in the 
correctness of the view I had taken. Upon meeting with the lar¬ 
vae and pupae of this species on the dahlia, the query occurred to 
my mind, whether, if an individual that was young and growing 
were to sustain itself a portion of the time upon tho brilliant red 
flower leaves of this plant, it might not acquire a red color thereby, 
and thus grow to be the Red-lined instead of remaining the Yellow- 
lined species. And I was revolving it in my thoughts how I could 
test this by experiment, when, in August 1865, I was taken quite 
by surprise in meeting upon the dahlia with what appeared to be 
one of these Yellow-lined Leaf-hoppers having the basal half of its 
thorax pale w'ith the stripes upon it crimson and the inner margin 
of its wing covers also tinged with this color. Thus, after I had 
been gathering and inspecting these insects upwards of twenty 
years, a specimen such as I was in pursuit of presented itself to 
me, seeming to be intermediate between tho two species in ques¬ 
tion, having its stripes partly red and partly yellow. I had all 
along suspected that Mr. Say had seen a specimen similar to this, 
which had led him to regard the Yellow-lined examples as a mere 
variety, and I hereupon supposed that I was probably in error in 
elevating them to the rank of a distinct species. A few weeks 
afterwards, a second sjiecimen similarly colored presented itself to 
me, and now, three years later, a third one comes to hand. And 
upon noticing that these three examples were nearly alike, tho 
