Cambridge Entomological Club, 1874
PSYCHE

A Journal of Entomology

founded in 1874 by the Cambridge Entomological Club
Quick search

Print ISSN 0033-2615
January 2008: Psyche has a new publisher, Hindawi Publishing, and is accepting submissions

Article beginning on page 101.
Psyche 6:101-102, 1891.

Full text (searchable PDF)
Durable link: http://psyche.entclub.org/6/6-101.html


The following unprocessed text is extracted from the PDF file, and is likely to be both incomplete and full of errors. Please consult the PDF file for the complete article.

June 1591.1 PSYCHE. 101
say whether his collection, now owned by Oberthur, contains any specimen from either country; but he possesses specimens from French Guiana collected by Constant Bar at Isle Portal on the Maroni, the river which separates French and Dutch Guiana. He
gives a list of other localities from which he possesses specimens, but none of them are of special importance.
PROCEEDINGS OF SOCIETIES.
CAMBRIDGE ENTOMOLOGICAL CLUB.
8 MARCH 1889.-The 144th meeting was
'held at 156 Brattle St., the president in the chair.
Dr. H. A. Hagen said that the cyclamens in a greenhouse in Montvale, Mass.,had been in- jured by Otiorhynchus suZcatus, and remarked on the history of our knowledge of its depre- dations in America.
Mr. S. Henshaw stated that it had recently been introduced into New Zealand where it is also doing much damage.
Mr. H. Hinkley showed a variety of Safzw- nia 10 in which the eye-spot on the hind wing is almond-shaped. He has raised a large
number and showed a fairly large series
which exhibited some very pretty gradations of color.
Mr. S. H. Scudder remarked on the former range of distribution of Pieris oleracea. He
gave as a reason why P. rapae has extermi- nated P. oleracea that the first brood of the former hatches about two weeks earlier than that of the latter species.
Mr. Scudder then read a paper on cosmo-
politan butterflies.
Dr. H. A. Hagen remarked briefly on the
distribution ofcertain dragon-flies in Brazil, showing that many are extremely local.
Mr. J. H Emerton showed drawings of the
copulatory organs of Agalena naevia.
The
palpal organs are, with few exceptions, of three varieties, the most common variety 'having a stout spiral tube of one and a half turns with the tip turned outward.
Another
variety found only in large individuals has the tube longer and more slender, and a third variety found in spiders of various sizes, has the tube very short and coiled in a small spiral. The epigynum is of two principal forms ; one with a simple opening, and the other, usually occurring in large spiders' with a wide opening partly divided into two by a process from the front edge; between these are many intermediate forms. The
other parts of the male palpi vary but little and there are no other variations which
would show that we have more than one
species of these spiders.
Mr. Emerton stated that he had found a
new species of spider in the natural history society building in Boston. There were two specimens, one male and one female. They may be foreign as they were found near some West Indian material that had been there for about two years.
[The records of several meetings at this point have been lost.]
11 October, 1889.-The 148th meeting of
the Club was held at 156 Brattle St., the president in the chair.
The secretary stated that the records of the last meeting had been mislaid.
Mr. S. H. Scudder gave an account of what had been done at the meeting of the Execu- tive Committee, and showed the circular
which was sent soliciting subscriptions to Psyche.
Mr. Scudder then gave a brief account of his field work in the west during the past summer for the U. S. Geological Survey.
Having first visited Florissant in order to make sure of bringing home a sufficient
number of fossil insects to warrant the out- lay of the expedition, he next went to west- ern Colorado to examine two localities near together. One of them on the summit of the Roan Mountains, on the divide between the White and Grand Rivers, where fossil plants of species identical with those found at Flor- issant had been obtained many years ago,



================================================================================

[June 1891
and the other in the lower White River, where at two different localities forty miles apart Denton had many years ago brought home a small collection of fossil insects of presum- ably the same age as those at Florissant. In both of these places the party was very
successful. The journey had to be made in a wagon and the search among the rocks on foot or on horseback, and as the greater part of the time had to be given up to the attempt to discover which beds contained fossil in- sects, very little was left for the exploitation of the same; for the beds in which insects were found covered an area of hundreds of square miles, and in a vertical series ranging from five hundred to fifteen hundred feet, in nearly all of which some remains were found but in certain localities, especially at the ex- treme upper beds, in such abundance as to warrant the belief that each of these localities may be richer than that of Florissant, hither- to believed to be the richest in the world. Subsequent visits were made to Green River, Wyo., where the pocket in which all speci- mens had hitherto been found had been en- tirely worked away, and his efforts were direc- ted to the discovery of some new location in the immediate vicinity; in this he was suc- cessful, and was able to obtain several hun- dred specimens; at Fossil in the same terri- tory, insects were found to occur so rarely as not to warrant a search for them. and at Amethyst Mt., in the Yellowstone Park, no strata sufficiently fine in which to preserve the remains of fossil insects were found in those beds which have yielded the leaves of plants.
Mr. Scudder then showed specimens of
some of the fossil Diptera brought from Col- orado. He said that the same species of lar- vae had been found throughout five hundred vertical feet of strata.
Dr. H. A. Hagen remarked on Dr. Pack-
ard's article in Psyche on the epipharynx of insects which he considers very important. He said that European white ants had been introduced into Panama.
Mr. S. H. Scudder remarked on the scarcity of butterflies and in fact of all insects in the Yellowstone Park, and indeed throughout all the west during the past summer.
Mi-. H. Hinkley said that he had investi- gated whether the milk-weed butterfly hiber- nates or not and came to
the conclGsion that
it does not.
Mr. Scudder said that he had found it very difficult to make butterflies which hibernate in nature do so in confinement, so that he does not place much faith in negative evidence from artificial experimentation.
Mr. Hinkley said that a fungus disease very like muscardine has attacked the larvae of A. ĺ´promethe during the past summer. He said that he had raised a true second brood of this species, and had reared large numbers of other Bombycidae in close proximity to his prometheas and none were affected.
8 NOVEMBER, 1889.-The 149th meeting of
the Club was held at 156 Brattle St., the president in the chair.
Dr. H. A. Hagen in commenting upon an
article on the gipsey moth (Ocne~ia dis'pay) in the Boston Transcript for 31 October, 1889 said that he remembered the fact of the acci- dental introduction of the species by Mr. L. Trouvelot some twenty years ago. Judging from his experience with the species in Eu- rope, Dr. Hagen doubted the necessity for legislative acts and appropriations in order to suppress its ravages.
Mr. S. H. Scudder exhibited a fossil trilo- bite which showed a remarkable resemblance to a scarabaeid-beetle (Phanaeus), also a new species of fossil butterfly (hbarothea floyissanti) from Florissant, Col. This butter- fly is the second of the Libytheinae found at Florissant, and is most closely related to the European species ; the other (^Prolibythea vagabiinda) is most nearly allied to the species from West Africa. Of the known
fossil butterflies one ninth are Libytheinae; of living species one eight-hundredth belong to the same family.
Mr. Scudder also exhibited a photograph
of a suffused melanic male of P w o turntts sent by Mr. James Fletcher of Ottawa.




================================================================================


Volume 6 table of contents