News for Naturalists 4 Part 3

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NEWS FOR NATURALISTS. " I would advise all in general that they would take into serious consideration the true and genuine ends of Knowledge. T h a t they seek it not either for pleasure, or contention, or contempt of others, or for profit or fame, or for honour and promotion, or such like adulterate and inferior ends. But that they may regulate and perfect the same."—Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon, 1561-1618. " MEMOIRS of the Suffolk Naturalists' Society, N u m b e r ii," is prepared in MS. for publication. It consists of the ' Beetles of Suffolk. Compiled by Members : Recorder, the late Chester Goodwin Doughtv, esq., B.A., LL.B.' ; and includes 2234 species (an addition of 122 on the figures given at Trans, iii, p.

247), out of the total 3588 in all Britain.

Several or our neophytic Coleopterists, Lord Cranbrook, M M .

Stanley, Goddard, Geoff. Burton, &c, are paving such attention to the subject as exigencies of the times will allow. But these untoward restrictions to Science render general Members' especia! donations of a guinea to the Memoir's publication imperative.

All such will be ackncuvledged by the Hon. Secretary, Monks Soham House, Framlingham.

FROM M I S S A. E. H I N D of Felsham Rectory the Ipswich Museum has just received the late Dr. W . M . Hind's M S S . &c, of his 1889 ' Flora of Suffolk,' still our Standard work on the comital Phanerogams; together with a small Collection of Fungi, Lichens and Algse : the whole has been examined and recorded by the Revd. F. N. Bloomfield of Guestling. This Museum alreadv possessed Hind's large Herbarium cf Suffolk Plants, open to all students' inspection.

F E N L A N D must look to her laureis, for (writes our Member, Colonel Hawley) I saw a most interesting article in ' T h e Field ' of 25 Nov. 1939 by M r . Antony Russell, announcing some queer finds in D o r s e t : apparently a small pond was found to be swarming with Phragmatcecia castanea, Hb., and produced also several Meliana flammea, Curt., of which neither species is recorded from the south of England before I believe. Also a Single specimen of M r . P. J. Burton's Monodes venustula, IIb.,

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from Swanage; besides several other uncommon Macrolepidoptera. Our Wiltshire downs have been saved, at any rate for the present (he adds last Feb.), from the desecration of militarv Operations ; but I hear the latest suggestion is to use part of the New Forest, that near Godshill [described by Gough's adds. to Camden, i, 126, as covered with thick Oaks that old folk in 1811 could just remember], which probably wont matter much if it be finished off properlv, as it has been burnt out regularly everv summer since I can remember.

WE WELL remember gazing with no small scepticism at Blue bottle-flies (Calliphora vomitoria, L . ) in the British Museum, labelled as having been vomited by a girl in England : the exact locality given is forgotten. But it really is true that a FLV can slav a Man, like Jack the Giant-killer. For Professor Nothnagel read a paper before the Society of Vienna Physicians some time ago, detailing the death of well-to-do brewer's son of three-and-twenty, after a painful ailment of six months that could not be diagnosed by any doctor, including German specialists. He swallowed an ordinary Bluebottle which, before succumbing to the heat of his stomach wherein it was eventually discovered, deposited its grubs in his intestines. These were shown by post mortem examination to have riddled part of the large intestine by either causing ulcers there or eating their way through its wall. Few parallel cases are stated to be known, thanks be !

IT IS NOT generally known that the name of the west-central African ' Camaroons ' is derived from Portugese camaroes, referring to 'the Prawns [species ? ] which abound upon that coast (FitzGerald's 1934 ' Africa,' p. 106).

THE SMALLEST Insect known is generallv stated to be the extra-European beetle Nanosella fungi, which is narrower than long and no more than one-hundredeth of an inch in length.

It pertains to the family Ptillidae (olim Trichopterygidae), whose members have a world-wide distribution, with about fifty species in Britain, and their wings fringed with hairs ; its largest exponent is but one-twelfth of an inch in length.

For years it was thought that Alaptus excisus, one of the Hvmenopterous parasites of the eggs of Psocus (Trans, i, 183), was even smaller ; but careful remeasurement showed this Mymarinae (loc. cit. iii, 41) to be merely one-fiftieth of an inch long, though some kinds of the same subfamily extend to only one-seventy-fifth.

Many of the Chalcid subfamily Trichogrammatinae also are very minute, such as Oophthora semblidis, Aur., described from eggs of the Lacewing-fly Sialis lutaria in 1898 and found to be British at Cambridge in 1936.

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AN AMUSING XNSTANCF. o f one o f t h e v e r y f e w occasions u p o n

which Darwin's inductive reasoning went agley is yet remembered at the Cromwell-road Museum. No one was more capable of fully appreciating the wealth of material housed in even the old British Museum at Bloomsbury, and he was wont to assert: ' I f the t r u t h of Evolution is proved anywhere, it is proved in the Insect Room. T h i s w i l l be the battle-ground of the future.

Nowhere eise do you get such a complete chain of links.' One day the great man arrived with a problem to solve : he had found a T u l i p so deeply recessed that one could not teil how fertilisation could be effected. N o M o t h was known with long enough proboscis ; but w i t h the remark, ' I t must be inches in length,' he set out to uncurl the tongues of the largest Hawkmoths. And, at length, one of these Sphinges was discovered to not only possess a suctorial organ of precisely the desired capacity but to have originated from the T u l i p ' s own locality : a great t r i u m p h ! A t least, the data tallied so exactly that D a r w i n considered the matter concluded. Later, unfortunately, it has been ascertained that that particular T u l i p is fertilised invariably by a Bee which, when unable to crawl down the floral tube, simply bites its way through at its base.

T H E P E R I O D at which part of the ancestrally four-winged Insects became specialised into the great Order of two-winged Dipterous ' flies ' has been recently fixed by D r . R. J. T i l l y a r d to be between Upper Permain and Upper Triassic areas of geologic time (Nature, 9 Jan. 1937). He discovered the fossil genus Permo-Tipula, our Daddy-longlegs' forebears, along with a closely allied genus of Proto-Diptera w i t h four wings in the former, and a true bisalar Dipteron is known from the' latter, Stratum. But cause for so radical a modification has yet to be established.

Q U I T E the best exposure of our Eocene Septarian Limestone at present visible is to be seen in the Stour estuary cliff between Stutton and Harkstead. Here it occurs as a continuous or intermittent bed of some twelve inches in thickness near the base of the cliff. I n it at Stutton Cliff is contained at least one fine erratic boulder of the Hertfordshire conglomerate Puddingstone.

T H I S was one of the islands which stud the China Sea ; Borneo lav far to the south and, away to the north, P. and O. steamers were churning en route to Japan or the Straits Settlements. I t was volcanic and highly mineralized, sparsely dotted w i t h casuarina, poon, and other trees resembling ebony and cedar, the quinine-giving cinchonas, the cassava or tapioca-plant and some sago plants . . . Before night feil with the suddenness of

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the tropics, the sun was sinking in a cloudless sky and the air was clear, free from the tremulous haze of hot hours. Across the smooth expanse of sandy ground came the agonized shrieks of a startled bird, a large bird it would seem, winging its wav towards them w i t h incredible swiftness, and uttering a succession of loud full-voiced notes of alarm. Yet not a b i r d was to be seen : at that hour the feathered inhabitants of the island were quietly nestling among the branches, preparatorv to making final selection of night's resting-places and none would stir, unless actually disturbed. They strained their eyes towards the approaching sound, but nothing was visible. Still the clucking noise came nearer, passed them within a yard, and was some distance away towards the reef when the sailor laughed : " A beetle ! A small, insignificant-looking fellow, so small that I did not see h i m until he was almost out of ränge. He has the loudest voice for his size in the vvhole of creation. A man, able to shout on the same scale, could easily make himself heard for twenty miles." " Then I do not like such beetles," she protested; " I always hated beetles, but this latest sort is detestable. Such nasty things ought to be kept in zoological gardens, and not let loose." . . . That night long after dark there came, hurtling through the air, the weird cries of the singing beetle, returning from a successful foray on Palm-tree Rock.

T h i s second advent of the insect preceded their slumber . . . Some nights later, the rising moon silhouetted the cliff on white coralstrewn sand, the sea sang a lullabv to the reef, and a fresh breeze whispered among the palm-fronds, when an unlooked for intruder disturbed the quietude of the scene : the singing beetle chortled his loud way across the sand (selected from Louis Tracy's c.

1910 ' Rainbow Island,' wherein the position indicated points rather to the Tizard Banks than to the Paracel Isles, and so but a couple of hundred miles west of the Philippines).—Such details in a novel are arresting to anv entomologist, though the British Museum had overlooked them. But, upon their presentation to him, M r . W . Bryant there at once recognised " the Bolboceras Beetle, of course." Its singing habit is well known to travellers, and probably common to that whole genus ; he has heard it in the Argentine, where a small species, about the size of our Odontasus, is the loudest of his acquaintance, in Borneo and Australia.—Suffolk association lies i n the fact that Bolboceras was first described in the erstwhile parsonage, facing the west end of church lane, of Barham by the Ven. W i l l i a m K i r b y , who read a paper upon it before the Linnean Society on 17 February 1818 (Trans. L i n n . Soc. xii, p. 459); he knew nothing of its habits but places six species in Bolboceras and describes another as new, B. Australasiae f r o m New Holland, w i t h a coloured figure by John Curtis of N o r w i c h (I.e., pl. xxiii, 5).

Our Member, Sir Hudson Beare, met this species

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when living in Australia sixty vears ago, " so long ago that I have forgotten all their ways, except that the beggars seemed to burrow always in very liard ground.

They are most fascinating little chaps," he writes on 16 Jan. last ; to which Dr. Blair adds on 2 Feb. that the larvse feed underground, not on plant-roots like our allied Cockchafer but, as far as is known on subterranean Fungi, Truffles, &c. Kirby compares his genus with the British dor-beetles, Geotrypes ; and Bryant considers their singing flight analogous with the well known hum made by the latter when on the wing at dusk : it is quite distinct from their stridulation, which Arrow describes at Trans. Ent. Soc. 1904, p. 728. Bolboceras is a large genus, now known from every considerablc land-surface of the world, so one can but guess that the above species, on an islet of the South China Sea, may be the Philippine B. nigriceps, Wiede.

STEADY COLLECTING of ossicles of fossil Starfish has enabled M M . Claud W . and E. V. Wright to reconstruct, in their ' Notes on Cretaceous Asteroidea ' read before the Geological Society on 13 December last, the form of several species whereof complete specimens are vet unknown. T h e group has received little attention of late years ; two new kinds of the important genus Metopaster are described, whose holotvpes are both specimens that have been reconstructed on plasticine from mere constituent ossicles. Tn this ingenious way additions have been made to the knowledge of several such groups as Metopaster and Calliderma. New data are adduced respecting the dispersal of certain species from north to south in Britain, similar to that from France to England which was recorded in a ditferent genus

by Spencer.

Mention is also made of pellets from ossicles, that are presumed to have been ejected by echinodermatophagous fishes.

Whence becomes evident the difficulty, stich as Mr. Doughty experienced (p. xci supra), of working upon fragmentarv fossils. " EXPENSIVE M O T U H U N T .

A plea [sir] that he was hunting moths was made at Lowestoft yesterday by a 34-year-old dental mechanic, Alfred B. Mitton, of 50, Acton Road, Lowestoft, who was fined 20s., with 5s. costs, for flashing a torch in an upward direction. Special constables described how defendant flashed a powerful unscreened torch in hedges and up trees, the light being first seen from half a mile awav. One of the witnesses declared that the beam was ' like a miniature searchlight,' and added [damning evidence in court!] that defendant had a butterfly net with him. Defendant told the Bench that he thought torches need not be screened in open country. T h e Mayor (Major S. W . Humpherv) described the case as flagrant " not to say flashy ! (East Anglian Daily Times, 12 April 1940).

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Splendid : the Martyr's Crown is yours in the honoured cause of Science ! Mr. Mitton has the sympathy of the whole Society behind him ; and we hope he captured Moths good enough to balance the bother and inconvenience of such puerile proeeedings.

F-DISON originated electrocution on a practical scale, when he waged successful war on Cockroaches. We are greater believers in the humanity of electricity as a destroying agent when thus applied than when used punitively for Man. We now hear that Edison's original device has been greatly improved upon, and applied to prevent caterpillars from climbing trees. Alternate wires of copper and zinc are run round the trunk, at about a half-inch apart. T h e casual Caterpillar mounts the trunk with the confidence and vigour, born of an impending feast. Presently he reaches the copper wire, pokes his nose over it, and lets another kink out of his backbone. Half an inch further up his front legs strike the zinc, so the circuit is completed, and the unfortunate larva also is a martyr to Science.—Science Gossip.

A FATAL BEETLE ! A verdict of death by misadventure was returned by the Leicester Coroner last September at the inquest upon a five-years old boy. He had been ' bitten by a Rove Beetle and later died from blood poisoning ' ; Prof. P. A. H. Muschamp considered this the first known case of a Devil's Coach-horse harming anyone (London press, 16 Sept. 1940).

We have been told by a bare-backed man that he was nipped upon inadvertentlv sitting on Ocypus olens, L. ; but, for enough poison to be ejected into so slight a puneture as to cause death, the insect must have been previously feasting upon some peculiarly foul substance, quite possibly one of the more poisonous Fungi.

CERTAINLY prevention is better than eure ; but, in the case of the horrific Colorado Beetle, it has been carried to lengths nothing short of ridiculously expensive. Needless terror of this Doryphora decemlineata, Say, was not conveyed in Miss Ormerod's original report of ' speeimens found at Liverpool in a cattle-boat from Texas in the autumn of 1877 ' for it is not a Beetle " deemed likely to be injurious in this c o u n t r y " (Injurious Insects 1890, 170). As a matter of fact, we can not discover that a round dozen ever gained footing here : one or two were imported to both Liverpool and Bristol in 1877 ; in August 1901 they first bred ' in various stages' on a small Potatoe-patch in allotments at Tilbury docks. At that time Sir Hiram Maxim described the imago as resembling the convex side of a black-and-yellow striped mandoline, adding that it emerges from pupa by night and at dawn flies eight to ten miles

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always eastward, and there settles upon a Potatoe-field that its ensuing larvae devour to such an extent that ' the Germans will no longer make alcohol from Potatoes.' In July 1904 two fine specimens were deposited at the Hereford Library, raising a local scare. Later another two turned up, again at the Tilbury docks, which we fruitlessly examined for more in 1931. Finally in September 1933, M r . William Burn leapt into scintillating stardom upon having a Beetle, detected upon his bowler-hat at Berwick, that ' might have been the Colorado p e s t : ' a native of Nebraska and Iowa that spread to the United States' east coast in 1876, and thence has gained a footing in Germany.

No ; devastating as the ravages of this nearctic pest may be when present in plenty, its British invasion is likely to be cceval with that of the Germans, as suggested in the London press last mid-September: but ' He cometh not, she said.'