28 
REPORTS OF SOCIETIES. 
impressions. The writer concluded by hoping these beds would be 
well worked for the light they might throw on the origin of some of 
our land and freshwater shells. The paper was illustrated with 
specimens and diagrams.—December 7th. Mr. J. Madison showed a 
large specimen of Paludina contecta, also specimens of Aviculopecten 
from the coal measures. Under the microscope, Mr. J. W. Neville 
showed the sheep tick, Ixodes reduvius; Mr. Dunn, Isthmia enervis and 
I. nervosa in situ on alga.—December 14th. Mr. J. Madison exhibited 
specimens of the following land shells :— Balia perversa , Vertigo anti¬ 
vertigo , Clausilia biplicuta, and Testacella haliotidea. Mr. Evans, a 
spine of fish, Asteracantlius minor, from Rhaetic beds, Axmouth. A 
paper was then read by Mr. J. W. Neville on “ Insects and Evolution.” 
The writer regretted that this subject was so rarely judged on its own 
merits, from the difficulty of considering it apart from certain impres¬ 
sions with which we are all more or less associated. The life of an 
insect was described in its several stages and the evidence of evolution 
pointed out in each. It was held to be particularly strong in the 
embryonic stage where organs sometimes appeared for a short time 
and were then absorbed, and in the larval stage, where adaptation to 
circumstances had made a great variety of forms. The looper cater¬ 
pillar was instanced as a remarkable departure from a normal form. 
Some loopers had come down to us without a remaining trace of six 
ancestral claspers, while others belonged, perhaps, to a more recent 
time, and the rudimentary claspers, from their stages of development, 
showed that they had been disused in pairs. The mouth organs of 
the imago were held to afford evidence of great modifications, if not of 
development, from a common origin. The paper was illustrated with 
drawings. 
LEICESTER LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY. 
—Section D, Zoology and Botany. Chairman, F. T. Mott, F.R.G.S. 
Monthly Meeting, Wednesday, December 16th; attendance seven 
(three ladies). The following objects were exhibited, viz.: By Dr. 
Cooper, a fine copy of Stevenson and Churchill’s “ Medical Botany,” 
1834, two handsomely bound volumes, the coloured plates of which 
were much admired. By Mr. W. A. Yice, a collection of fungi, chiefly 
on bark, as Gorticium , Nectria, &c., and a curious specimen of the 
rather rare Lentinus lepidens, with its hard and solid stem curved into 
a semicircle. By the chairman, a copy of De Puydt’s “Orchids,” in 
French, with fifty fine coloured plates; a copy of Edgeworth’s “ Pollen ;” 
drawings in pen and ink and pencil of hairs and epidermal cells of 
the sunflower, and of an unnamed orchid, from the island of Tobago, 
in the collection of J. G. Ward, Esq., of Belgrave ; also a mass of 
petrified moss, from the Cropstone Waterworks, where a slight leakage 
of water, escaping through the masonry of a stone wall, carried lime, 
probably derived from the mortar, and deposited it on the moss on 
which it dropped. Some experiments were made in the measuring of 
heads and faces, according to the formulas given by Mr. Smith in the 
December number of the “ Midland Naturalist.” Among the seven 
members present, one was dolichocephalic, five mesoceplialic, and one 
brachycephalic ; four were narrow-faced and three broad-faced ; five 
were orthognathous and two hyperorthognathous. It was found that 
Mr. Smith had scarcely given sufficient details to enable learners to 
use his formulae with certainty, and there appeared to be some printer’s 
errors in the text. It would be interesting if Mr. Smith would revise 
and elaborate them. 
