Page:The Zoologist, 3rd series, vol 1 (1877).djvu/61

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PROCEEDINGS OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES.
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to fifteen), which were furnished with wing-rudiments and live in the water, whilst the first specimen that is captured at Huissen, inside the house at a lamp, is a female with well-developed wings.' I must confess that I cannot follow this reasoning. Be it remembered that no difference is suggested in the males from the different localities, and the supposed distinctness of the species rests entirely on the possession by the females in the one case of developed and in the other of rudimentary wings. From Arnheim and Huissen, males, and one winged female captured; from Overween, males, and fifteen unwinged females bred. Ergo, two species! Surely this is a non sequitur. It is, in fact, a repetition of Brown's argument (with which I dealt in the 'Transactions' for 1872, p. 142), that the winged female occurs in one locality, and the apterous females in another locality. I can scarcely see how the facts mentioned by Ritsema can be said to fortify any opinion one way or the other. So far from proving the duality, they are quite consistent with the unity of the species. And recalling the facts that Curtis and Dale took both forms of female at Glanville's Wootton, that Brown bred the apterous and McLachlan captured the winged form at Burton, and lastly that Ritsema himself, in 1870, found pupæ at Haarlem from which two females emerged, of which one had rudimentary and the other well-developed wings, I venture to hazard a conjecture, that if Ritsema perseveres with his breeding from Overween larvæ, he will obtain some females with wings as ample as those which flew to the lamp at Huissen.

"In conclusion, one word of regret, a tribute to Members this Society has lost. In the short period since the publication of my former paper on Acentropus, of those to whom I then referred as living authors, death has removed no less than three—Henry Doubleday, Edward Newman and Edwin Brown."— F.G.[1]



NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.


A History of British Birds. By the late William Yarrell, V.-P.L.S., F.Z.S. Fourth Edition. Revised by Alfred Newton, M.A., F.R.S., Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy in the University of Cambridge. Part 10, Nov. 1876.Van Voorst, Paternoster Row.

We note with satisfaction the appearance of another part of the new edition of this standard work, the issue of which is steadily, although, we regret to say, slowly progressing. In some measure, no doubt, the advancement of the work has been retarded by

  1. Ferdinand Grut (Wikisource-ed.)