Knowledge of the breeding habits of the Anopheline mosquitos has advanced greatly since the days when it was considered that the larvae of any species were distributed indiscriminately in all and sundry collections of stagnant water. In the Federated Malay States entomological research, which has now extended over many years, tends to show that preferences by the various species for different kinds of breeding-places exist; and attempts have been made to define in relation to particular species, or groups of species, or groups of species, the types of breeding-place favoured.

[The systematic keys to the species of Aphids that attack Graminaceae, recently published by Mr. A. K. Mordvilko (Bull. Petrograd Div. Sta. Protect. Plants from Pests, iii, no. 3, 1921, 72 pp., 19figs.) are likely to be of considerable value to students of these injurious insects, and it seemed desirable that they should be translated from Russian into English. The original keys are very lengthy, and therefore Mr. B. P. Uvarov has kindly condensed them, and they have then been translated, under his supervision, by Miss F. B. Constable, of the Imperial Bureau of Entomology. Mr. F. Laing, of the British Museum, has also kindly assisted with advice in regard to certain technical points.—Ed.]

While engaged in working out some small lots of Psyllid parasites from various parts of the world, I have found it necessary to examine, as far as possible, the records of Chalcids which up to the present have been bred from these hosts. The literature has proved to be more extensive than had been anticipated, and it has therefore seemed well to bring together and list these scattered references when describing the forms that have been considered as new.

The species for which this genus is proposed is closely allied to Polydrusus, Germ., and agrees with it in all its more salient characteristics; but it differs from all the species of that genus known to me in the following points:—The head bears a long, deep median furrow; the epistome forms a large bare smooth triangular area, which is well defined and in no way impressed, but even slightly convex; the elytra have a prominent posterior callus, and the ninth and tenth striae coalesce in the middle for one-third of their length.

The collection here described was sent for determination by Dr. K. Kertész to Mr. F. V. Theobald in 1911, and was passed on to the writer by Mr. Theobald in 1911. Most of the specimens were collected by Fiebrig, and these unfortunately bear no exact data. A few (including the type of Janthinosoma paraguayensis) were collected by Vezényi, mostly at Asuncion in 1904. Though not large, the collection contains a high percentage of apparently undescribed forms, which are dealt with below. The holotypes of two of the new species are in the collection of the Budapest Museum, but in those cases where the species has been described from a number of cotypes, the material has been divided between the Budapest Museum and the British Museum. Since little seems to have been recorded concerning the mosquitos of Paraguay, I give first a list of all the species included in the collection.

The present notes are a short account of work of a preliminary nature on the Coast of Kenya Colony, mostly between August 1920 and February 1921, at the end of a tour of service, and may serve to indicate some of the chief points calling for investigation. They are concerned with the life-history of the insect and with some field observations. The life-history work was carried out in tents shaded by a large mango tree, on land kindly lent by Sheik Ali bin Salim, on the north side of Mombasa Island. The field work was done on the island and on the neighbouring mainland. For records of the numbers of beetles captured on European plantations I am indebted to three gentlemen owning or managing them.

For many years I have collected and bred the Indian Calliphorinae, and recently contributed a number of papers describing the common species. In the first of these, which appeared in a recent number of the Indian Journal of Medical Research (viii, no. 1, July 1920), I described in some detail the egg, larva, puparium and adults of Chrysomyia bezziana, Villeneuve, the Old World screw-worm fly, and pointed out that this species is a specific myiasis-producing Calliphorine, only breeding in living tissues, and that its larvae may be found in all forms of cutaneous, subcutaneous, nasal, oral, aural and vaginal myiasis in man and animals. In the succeeding papers I described the larvae, puparia and adults of the other common species, two of which, Chrysomyia megacephala and Lucilia argyricephala, occasionally cause myiasis in animals in India. It was not possible at the time to determine the non-myiasis-producing species, and new names were given them. But recently, when studying the species of Musca in the National Collection at the British Museum, I was able to examine Walker's types and am now in a position to give these Indian species their correct names. At the same time I have examined all the Calliphorine material in the National Collection from other parts of the world, as well as many specimens in my own collection, and I propose in this and in succeeding notes to collect together all the results of my studies with a view to revising later the species of blow-flies. Here again I am deeply indebted to Major E. E. Austen, D.S.O., for the valuable help he has given me in this work.

When carrying out an investigation into the mosquitos of New Zealand, * the writer found that a very common species bred in saline and semi-saline pools above high water mark along the rocky parts of the North Island coast line. For some time it was considered that this mosquito was unrecorded, but it appears that Hutton described it as a Tipulid under the name Opifex fuscus.† This was pointed out to me both by Mr. G. V. Hudson, of Wellington, who is in possession of Hutton’s Tipulid types and had seen the illustrations here reproduced, and later on by Mr. F. W. Edwards, of the British Museum, who published a short account of the insect from material recently sent to him by Mr. Hudson.‡