OBSERVATIONS
83
T h e point is that they must have been in the cloth when the purchaser received the suit from the shop, I expect; and, as he says it is ruined by them, they must surely have been there longer than a fortnight to work so much damage and grow so large. Will you give me your comments ?—H. E. CHIPPERFIKLD ; 21 September. [The depredators are larvae of that omnivorous curse, the Beetle Anthrenus musceorum, L . (cf. Trans, vi, 233) ; and, as they are nearly fully grown, must certainly have been in the cloth at least one month.—ED.], SUFFOLK GLOW-WORMS PROFUSE.—One day in July about 1920 fifty or sixty Glow-worms, which are frequent in the park and graveyard there, flew to an indoors light at a first-storev window of north Holton Rectory. Their phosphorescent lights were so brilliant and strong that the Rector's wife called her two daughters in to marvel at it.—(Miss) MADGE WILT.IAMS, Lowestoft; October 1950. [Such would be a common experience in Derby, Glos, or Berks, where this Lampyris noctiluca, L., is abundant; but in SufFolk it is rarely if ever seen on Boulder-clay and is now usually sparse on even our Sandy soils, though formerly (Wake's Southwold 1839, p. 240) frequent through the district in question We have often taken isolated larvae and the large yellow eggs in moss and low herbage there, about Brandon and in Bentlev Woods (Entom. xxix, p. 64), but on 8 July 1929 discovered a perhaps unique Situation in the New Forest. There Chester Doughty and we borrowed a ladder and were working for Phlaeotrya rufipes, GvL, from the top of it when we found a 2 Glow-worm in the midst of a score of her eggs under the bark of a dead Oak-tree at just twenty feet from the ground in Rhinefields Sandys.—Ed.] SIZE OF Ochina hedera, M U L L . — A male, so small that I did not recognise it as pertaining to this specics, was Walking up the glass of a ground-floor window at Monks Soham on 2 July 1950. Careful measurement showed it to be barely 2 mm. in length. This Beetle is very common among the old Ivy on my house-walls ; and the largest $ taken here, on 12 June 1929, is exactly 3\ mm. long. This is a remarkable divergency of size, and especially notable because Fowler allows it no more than 2 | - 3 mm.—CLAUDE
MORLEY.
T H E BEETLES OF A P I T . — T h e enclosed specimens [Cicinela campestris, Coccinella 7-punctata, Lucanus cervus 9, Melolontha vulgaris, Malachius bipustulatus, Chrysomela polita, Cassida viridis and flaveola with Apion miniatum—Ed.] were collected while I was working an old Red Crag pit at Hascot Hill in Battisford last spring. I send them as a matter of interest.—PHILIP CAMBRIDGE ; July.
Platycnemis pennipes, PALL.—This small and mainly pure-white Dragonfly was very common on 9 July beside the River Stour at Nayland, where Miss Longfield and I had found the species