50 
SOME MARSH BEETLES OF THE LEA VALLEY. 
(Read November 7th, 1899, by F. 13. JENNINGS, F.E.S.). 
I propose in this “ communication ” to try to convey to your 
minds, with as little technicality as possible, some pictures of beetles 
in their haunts as I find them in my collecting rambles in the above 
locality. The few beetles I have had time to put together for 
exhibition in connection therewith will no doubt, to lepidopterists, 
seem dingy objects enough, but, as 1 shall endeavour to show, the 
interest which attaches to them does not depend in any great degree 
upon their coloration. 
Eastward of the railway line which traverses the southern portion 
of the Lea Valley, and lying between it and the range of low, undulat¬ 
ing hills which forms its eastern border, is a long strip of Hat, marshy 
ground, through which winds the river Lea, its tributaries and 
backwaters, and through which, between Broxbourne and Tottenham, 
runs the straight-cut line of the Lea canal. Besides the actual 
streams, numerous ditches intersect the marshy fields. In that 
particular part of this territory which 1 have in my mind we shall 
find, at the proper season, a wealth of vegetable life springing up. 
This is in the month of May, at which time the large golden cups and 
rounded shining leaves of the marsh marigold rise in little clumps 
above the level of the surrounding herbage, and the cowslips, and the 
buttercups, with a few straggling blossoms of the lesser celandine, all 
combine to make the low-lying fields a mass of yellow, when the 
pretty snow-white flowers of the stitchwort star the hedgerows, 
while the lavender blossoms and dark red leafshoots of the ground ivy 
present a beautiful contrast on those ditch-banks where lately the 
strange-looking flower spikes of the butter-bur, rising scarcely above 
the level of the surrounding soil, were almost the sole indications of 
the approaching spring. Now, too, the tall hawthorn hedges which 
separate the fields are one mass of pink and white, haunted by busy 
Andrenae and hovering Diptera. 
In the ditches, the various sub-aquatic plants—the flags and 
rushes, the water speedwell, the tall valerian, the water-cress, and 
Udosdadum, are beginning to rise in that luxuriance which will 
eventually absorb the water through which they sprang, and choke up 
the dykes with their masses of greenery, while on their borders the 
umbel-like flower heads of the meadow-sweet, that most typical plant 
of the marshes, are getting ready to burst into blossom and disperse 
their delicate scent upon the breeze. Near by, in the river, the fish 
make joyous leaps into the glad sunlight, while to and fro amongst the 
adjacent willow branches Hits the reed hunting, and a silent observer 
may watch, stealing along the ditch sides, the quiet little sedge-warbler. 
And amongst the vegetable luxuriance which clothes the fields at this 
season there exists an abundant insect fauna, one which is largely 
peculiar to this marshy habitat. In the beetle world this is especially 
so, and no section of the order Coleoptera is better represented here 
than that of the weevils. Some kinds there are which live upon the 
