Photography is rapidly gaining in importance for record and descriptive purposes in scientific work. A good, clear photograph will convey much more to the reader of a text than pages of descriptive mattter. Until recent years drawings have held priority as illustrative material, and perhaps still do, but with the rapid advance of photography photographs are assuming a leading role.

Male. Length 2.2 mm. Second and third antennal segments equal in length. Punctures of the pronotum evident, those of the elytral intervals very indistinct. Metasternum very indistinctly alutaceous near the lateral margin; the punctures fine and close at middle except on the impunctate area, a trifle coarser on the sides and there distinct but not deeply impressed, very closely placed, the punctures of the anterior margin like those of the disk. Each abdominal segment finely and closely punctate, without coarser punctures on the basal margin.

The material on which the following paper is based is deposited in the United States National Museum to whose authorities I am indebted for the privilege of studying the collections of spiders in their charge. Several colleagues have been very generous in lending material and in giving advice. Particular thanks are due to Miss Elizabeth B. Bryant of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Dr. W. J. Gertsch of the American Museum of Natural History, and Professor R. V. Chamberlin of the University of Utah.

The speciles of the laudabilis group, formerly included in the Hadenine genus Polia but now placed in the recently erected genus Lacinipolia McD., have always proved more or less of a stumbling block to taxonomists. Variation in the individual species, combined at times with a certain amount of sex-dimorphism, has been partially responsible for the confusion, which of late years has been increased by the addition of certain of Strand's names, based on Hampson's so-called “aberrations,” and other names proposed in a varietal sense by Draudt for Mexican forms in the American Noctuid portion of Seitz' Macrolepidoptera of the World.

The results of a three year study of the imported parasites of Diprion polytomum show that an eulophid parasite, Microplectron fuscipennis Zett., gives promise of becoming an important control factor of the spruce sawfly in Canada. M. fuscipennis is widely distributed in Europe, and its habits there have been fully discussed by Morris and Cameron (1935) and by Ullyett (1936).