A long series of breeding experiments were conducted by the writer at the Malaria Bureau, F.M.S., between April 1920 and April 1921 with a view to obtaining in bred families a sufficiency of Anophelines for the purpose of study which might perhaps set at rest, once and for all, various long-vexed questions as to the validity of certain species; and for the purpose of obtaining further data than were previously available as to the bionomics of the insects.

During the two years that have elapsed since the publication by the writer of a previous paper on Palestine Tabanidae, a small amount of material belonging to this family has been received from the same country. With one exception, for the Diptera in question—which, though few in number, present several points of interest, besides including representatives of two new species—the National Collection is indebted to the kindness of either Mr. P. A. Buxton or Mr. I. Aharoni.

The main purpose of this note is to give a name to the Malayan Culicoides that sucks blood from the abdomen of Anopheline mosquitos, and thus to afford cover for the publication of some very interesting observations made recently upon this species by Dr. W. A. Lamborn. At the same time, some account is given of the very few additional specimens of Oriental Culicoides in the British Museum—most of which were also collected by Dr. Lamborn in Malaya; and the opportunity is further taken to describe two other apparently new species of the genus, from Somaliland and Jamaica, respectively, which have recently been received at the Museum.

The weevil, Syagrius fulvitarsis, Pasc., has been known for some time as an enemy of ferns, Mr. W. W. Froggatt having found it abundantly attacking ferns both in greenhouses and in the open in the Botanic Gardens at Sydney.

In this Bulletin for May 1918 (Vol. ix, pt. 1) some species of Tachinidae were described from India. It was the intention at the time to deposit the types in the British Museum (Nat. Hist.), but owing to war conditions it was considered advisable to retain them in Canada until a later date. In March of this year (1922) the type material was sent to the British Museum; a set of paratypes of most of the species was retained for the National Collection at Ottawa; and another, but larger, set of paratypes was sent to Mr. C. F. C. Beeson, the Forest Entomologist, at Dehra Dun, India.

The Imperial Bureau of Entomology has recently received from Fiji two examples of a Trichogrammatid bred from eggs of a Hispid, Promecotheca reichei, Baly, that mines in leaves of coconuts, and through the kindness of Dr. G. A. K. Marshall this material has been handed to me for examination. As received, the specimens (mounted in glycerine under the same cover glass) were too shrivelled to be studied satisfactorily. After some colour notes had been made, the wings of each specimen were detached and mounted. The bodies were then thoroughly potashed (10 per cent.) and transferred to glacial acetic in which, owing to their original pallor, they practically disappeared. They were accordingly stained for one minute with carbol fuchsin (Grübler), washed again in acetic acid, and gradually brought up to pure clove oil in which the dissection of one example was completed. Although it is unfortunately still no easy matter to determine the genera of the Trichogrammatidae, I have no hesitation in assigning the insects under discussion to Chaetostricha, Walker, in interpreting which I agree with Dr. Kryger's views in his paper on “ The European Trichogramminae ” (Entomologiske Meddelelser, xii, pp. 303–305, 1918). The ring joint in this genus is solid, but in both examples examined the funicular joint at the extreme base shows a clear, nearly complete, weakly chitinised ring, which must give additional flexibility to the antenna at this point.

In previous papers (1917,1921) accounts have been given of four species of the genus Bibio, and the present paper deals with two species of the genus Dilophus, viz., D. febrilis, L., and D. albipennis, Mg. They are the commonest species of Dilophus in Britain, and both frequently occur in great numbers.

In an investigation of the insect fauna of the soil, the obtaining of the insects from this medium has hitherto been a very laborious and tedious process. It has necessitated the crumbling of the soil by hand, and the examination of it in small quantities at a time over sheets of paper. This method is naturally a lengthy one, and in order to facilitate it the apparatus which is now described was designed.

Ischiogonus syagrii, sp. n.

Female. Long, 3·75 mm. Ochraceous (brown ochre, Winsor & Newton), the eyes, antennae outwardly, tips of mandibles, ocellar space, prosternum anteriorly and a thin line on either side on the groove of the notum, a large spot anteriorly on the mesopleurae, distal tarsal segment and the sheath of the ovipositor black. More or less thinly clothed with hair.

One of the greatest difficulties of anti-mosquito work in Palestine is that there are a series of swamps in the littoral plain, lying almost at sea level and prevented from draining into the Mediterranean by sand-dunes and sand-bars which block their outlet channels. It appears that cutting channels through the coastal dunes is a task which would have to be repeated at very frequent intervals, and until some-what large sums of money are available the pumping of these numerous swamps into the sea cannot be undertaken. There are, moreover, other rather large areas of marsh, notably Lake Huleh, Beisan marsh and the Marj Sanour, the proper drainage of which is at the moment beyond the financial resources of the country. We have therefore to rely for the moment on ameliorative measures which are admittedly not sufficiently radical. Among other things, I have begun a study of our native fish, hoping to find some small and voracious species that breeds rapidly and is able to live in waters of different degrees of salinity. The results which I have obtained are perhaps discouraging, but certainly interesting.

In a previous publication (1919), I brought our knowledge of the Ithonidae up to date, so far as the perfect insects were concerned, and gave a short account of the work which had been done by Mr. Luke Gallard and myself in discovering the habitats and dates of appearance of the commonest species, Ithone fusca, Newman. This paper also recorded our success, in November 1918, in obtaining numbers of fertile eggs, larvae and pupae. I promised then to give a full account of the life-history in a later paper, and that promise is now being fulfilled.

Species of the genus Hieroglyphus are well known in India as serious pests of rice, sugar-cane, Sorghum, and some other crops, but in nearly all economic entomological publications one species only, H. banian, F. (= furcifer, Serv.) is regarded as being noxious. It is obvious, however, from some of the earlier descriptions and figures that there is more than one injurious species, but the exact status of each one of them could not be established even in more recent economic publications owing to the very unsatisfactory state of the systematics of this group, which made correct identification of species uncertain even for a specialist and quite impossible for an economic entomologist. It is true that comparatively recently I. Bolivar (1912) and J. Carl (1916) published more or less comprehensive papers on the genus, but these papers are not revisions, as the authors did not include all the known species and hardly touched questions of synonymy; moreover, Carl's paper, though published four years after that of Bolivar, was written without any reference to the latter, which resulted in the same species being described twice under different names, thus increasing the confusion. Further, both these authors based their papers on insufficiently extensive material, so that they were unable to appreciate the range of variation in the species.