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Psyche 5:14, 1888.

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14 ps ?THf%. [ January-February 188.
EGG-LAYING OF LIMENITIS DISIPPUS.
On 12 July, in Sugar Hill, N. H., I saw a female Limenitis disz'å´ppv- flying heavily over a bank by the roadside. This bank was
covered with young poplar shoots, and, see- ing the butterfly settle on one of these, I followed her, and saw that she laid an egg on the tip of a leaf and then flew away. Picking the leaf, I followed her to the next shoot which she selected, and continued the chase until I had collected seventeen eggs. Then the butterfly rose higher in the air, flew to an ash-tree, and was hidden in the leaves.
A shower was near, and rain began
to fall in less than five minutes after she dis- appeared.
The eggs all hatched in due time, and pro- duced eleven males and six females, all per- fect.
One peculiarity of this female was that she laid more than the "one egg at the very tip," which books and pictures have led us to ex- pect.
One leaf had four eggs; one at the tip, two on one edge near the tip, and one on the other edge near the tip. Another leaf had two ; one on the tip, the other near it. The third leaf had three irregularly placed near the tip.
Afterwards I found four eggs, two on each side of the tip of a willow-leaf, but these were not near the same place, and were the only eggs of L. disiffus that I found on willow. I found no larvae on willow, while they were very abundant on poplar shoots close by. In fact L. disfp-pzis was more abundant this sum- '
mer than 1have ever found it before.
Caroline G. Soule.
A SPHAERULARIA-LIKE WORM.
In the American naturalist for January,
1886 (v. 20, p. 73-75), I called attention to some of the peculiarities of S-pJiaerularia born& a nematod parasitic internally in spe- cies of bumble-bees (Bombus), and to the fact that a species of Sphaerularia was
found in America. One remarkable pecul-
iarity of Sfhaeruluria is that the genital organs of the female evaginate, and form, when they have attained their full size, a worm-like body. The evaginated ovary is bo large in proportion to the worm itself, that the latter was, for a time, overlooked by nat- uralists, and the evaginated portion was described as a worm.
Professor R. Leuckart, whose researches
have done much towards completing our
knowledge of the life-history of Sfhaerula- ria, has published, in the Zoologischer an- zeiger (20 Dec. 1886, v. 9, p. 743-746), a preliminary communication entitled, "Ein spaerulariaartiger neuer nematode," in which he gives an account of the structure and habits of a nematod allied to SfhaeruZ~zria, to which he gives the name of Asconema
gibbosum. This worm was discovered in
the body-cavity of Cecidomyia fini, even in the larval state. The worm is about 0.6 mm. long, and the adult female bears, upon the ventral surface near the posterior extremity, a bean-shaped process about 0.25 mm. long. The digestive tract does not form a tube in the adult, but is reduced, as it is in S'phaerula- ria, to a chain of large cells.
The eggs of Asconema fall into the "body- cavity of their host, the Cccidomyia, where they hatch, but the young do not reach their sexual development until they are set free from the host, by the death of the latter. Sexual union takes place within a few days after the Asconema are free from their
host. After this the males die and the
females that get the opportunity pass into the Cecidomyia larvae, which inhabit soil composed of decaying pine-needles. Again in the body-cavity of a Cecidomyia, the
female develops and evaginates its genital organs, while the digestive tract becomes rudimentary. The ovaries of Asconema are not so large as those of Sfkaerdaria; while the latter worm requires a year for its devel- opment, Asconema develops in a few weeks. G : Dimmock.




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