ST. ALBANS AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD. 
235 
paths which cross it, often much encumbered with entangled 
branches, are well worth working. The area under review also 
includes parts of three river-valleys, the Lea, the Yer, and 
the Colne, and although there are no extensive marshes, the 
banks of these streams, with their semi-aquatic flora, yield 
many a desired species to the collector, in whichever Order of 
the great Class Insecta he may be interested. 
Coleoptera.— The beetles of the neighbourhood do not 
appear to have been adequately studied. In the long and 
very valuable list prepared for the ‘ Victoria History of the 
County of Hertford ’ by Mr. E. Gr. Elliman, there are but few 
records from the neighbourhood of St. Albans, Mr. Elliman’s 
observations having been chiefly made in the extreme north-west 
of the county. It is to be hoped that some student of this 
interesting Order of insects will be found to devote attention to 
the local beetles. 
Orthoptera.— This small Order, which only includes about 
60 British species, is interesting from the fact that several 
exotic insects have been introduced into the neighbourhood, 
chiefly with stove plants. Two large species of cockroach have 
established themselves in greenhouses, and the presence of one 
or two foreign grasshoppers and locusts has also been recorded. 
Of our local British Orthoptera no list has been made. 
Odonata. —So far as the dragonflies are concerned, Mr. E. B. 
Speyer has collected at Shenley on the south-eastern boundary 
of our district, and a few years ago he furnished a list of the 
Odonata he had taken there. Probably some of them were 
found just outside the area covered by these notes, but so 
close to the boundary-line that the following list, which has not 
previously been published, may be useful:— 8'ymjpetrum strio- 
latum (“ unusually plentiful in August and September, 1895 ”), 
8.flaveolum, 8. sanguineum, 8. scoticum (“a few”), *Libellula 
depressa (“fairly abundant”), Orthetrum cserulescens (“not 
captured”), 0 . cancellatum (male, “not captured”), *Cordule- 
gaster annulatus (“not captured”), *Anax imjperator (“usually 
plentiful but rather uncertain”), AEschna mixta, *AE. cyanea, 
*AE. grandis, Lestes viridis (male taken 11th August, 1899, and 
now in the collection at South Kensington), L. sponsa, Pyrrho- 
soma nymphula (“ observed only in June, 1905, when it was 
rather plentiful”), *Ischnura elegans, Agrion jpuella (“always 
abundant”), and A. cyathigerum (“sometimes in swarms”). 
Those marked # also occur in the writer’s garden at Kitchener’s 
Meads. To the species above enumerated may be added 
Calojoteryx splendens, which has been taken by Miss Alice 
Dickinson in the Lea valley, between Harpenden and Wheat- 
hampstead, bringing up the total for the neighbourhood to 19 as 
against 24 recorded for the county. 
Trichoptera. —When getting together a collection of Trichop- 
tera for the County Museum the following species were found in 
the vicinity of the city, and here again those captured round the 
