50 
The genus Onvix has similar habits, but generally turns down a 
corner of the leaf instead of making a cone. Perhaps the most often 
noticed member of this family is Gracilaria syringella, which often 
occurs in considerable numbers on lilac bushes in gardens, disfiguring 
the leaves with pale brown blotches, or rolling up the leaves like 
Tortricids. It is quite gregarious in habit. (Stt. Nat. tits., vol. viii., 
Wood, Ent. Mo. Mag., vol. xxvi., p. 138.) 
The exquisite insects known as Lithoeolletids are true leaf-miners, 
as they pass all their larval and pupal life in the same mine, usually 
on the underside of the leaf of the foodplant. Most species are 
attached to one or two particular foodplants, but the common 
Lithocolletis messaniella mines in the leaves of oak, evergreen oak, 
hornbeam, sweet chestnut, and beech. The mines can be recognised 
by their having one, usually the upper, portion domed, and on the top 
of the dome there are often little quadrangular pale spaces where the 
larva has eaten away the parenchyma. The larva usually, if not 
always, spins a cocoon inside the mine, and I imagine that in the 
autumn brood, after the leaves have left the tree, these cocoons must 
frequently become detached on account of the breaking up of the leaf. 
Swammerdam was, I believe, the earliest writer to notice these moths, 
but Frisch and Reaumur also mention them. (Stt. Nat. His., vol. ii.) 
The Nepticulids are leaf-miners par excellanee. They are all of 
small size and Nepticula acetusae is at present the smallest British 
lepidopteron. The newly laid egg may be described as a point of life 
in a globule of nourishment. (Ent. Bee., vol. xiii., p. 362.) But the 
egg shell, which is usually seen at the commencement of the mine, is 
not so transparent, and is usually filled with black excrement. The 
mine is generally a gallery, but sometimes forms a blotch. The larva 
has no ordinary legs but is furnished, in at least the last instar, with 
eight pairs of fleshy discs. De Geer says (Mem., vol. i., men, xiv., p. 
449), speaking of a rose-feeding Neiiticulid in 1737, that it has 
eighteen feet, and he repeats this observation nine years afterwards, 
remarking, “on ne peut pas assez verifier des observations nouvelleset 
singululieres.” The fact is, there are neither legs on the prothorax 
nor on the 1st abdominal segment, but the 1st abdominal segment 
often has the lower portion prolonged, and this under an indifferent 
lens or microscope, as De Geer probably had, might easily be counted 
for a leg. When fulifed the larva, in nearly all cases, leaves the mine 
and seeks a convenient situation to spin up. The summer brood soon 
matures and yields the imago, but the autumn brood passes the 
winter in the cocoon, though the common, Nepticula aurella, may be 
found feeding in its mine in a bramble leaf throughout the winter. 
The Nepticulids appear to be an ancient family, as traces of their work 
have been found in fossils of the Lower Miocene (lutt, Brit. Lip., 
vol. i., p. 181). As a help towards the future identification of the 
itmigo, the following particulars should be noted in the early stages of 
the Nepticulids: the foodplant, position in which the egg is laid, type 
of mine, arrangement of the excrement in the mine, and the colour of 
the larva. The study of the genus Nepticula has so recently and so 
marvellously been enlightened by one of our own members, Mr. Tutt, 
in the first volume of his British Lepidoptera, that little can as yet be 
added to our knowledge of these beautiful atoms, which will not be 
found incorporated in that excellent account. Nevertheless, every 
