Dr. Guy A. K. Marshall has recently submitted to me a Trypaneid, discovered in Northern Australia by Mr. G. F. Hill. The fly is said to have been bred from larvae having habits very different from those of the related members of the family; and being moreover interesting from a morphological and biogeographical standpoint, it forms the object of the present note.

In the course of a conversation in November 1917, Mr. E. Hutchins, the Chief Veterinary Officer, Uganda Protectorate, drew my attention to an outbreak of rinderpest in the Northern Province of the Protectorate, which first manifested itself in the buffalo of the Chopi Country. The disease was then rapidly spreading through the game in the Glossina morsitans area between Masindi Station and the Kafu River. He pointed out the excellence of the opportunity for investigating the alleged relationship between rinderpest and fly. As I had worked from May till September 1914 in the Northern Province fly belt in association with Mr. W. F. Fiske, I was in a particularly advantageous position to estimate any alteration in the fly distribution which might have occurred as a result of the epidemic. The question had a special local significance, as, should the disease prove fatal to the fly, the introduction of rinderpest among the situtunga on the Islands of Lake Victoria would simultaneously remove the reservoir and the carrier of the mammalian trypanosomes. My release from military duties was duly sanctioned in November 1917, but unfortunate circumstances over which I had no control postponed its fulfilment until April 1918. By this time the disease had almost worked itself out in the fly area, and, what is more to be regretted, the long-deferred rains had commenced throughout the district. The heart of a unique opportunity was thus lost.

The writer of the following notes has been engaged on entomological investigations in Fiji, Australia and Hawaii since 1914; the work has been entirely confined to the pests of sugar-cane and has been carried on mainly in the first-mentioned country, where insect depredations are very serious and materially reduce the profits on a considerable number of plantations. The investigation of these Fijian cane pests open up a field that is practically new, and so the work will probably continue for some considerable time. The length of the period that is likely to elapse before the publication of final results is such that it seems desirable to place on record a few of the main points in the life-histories of the more important insects of the sugar-cane plantations of that country, and so the writer has complied these notes containing summaries of their life-histories in so far as they are at present known to him.

Dr. Guy A. K. Marshall, Director of the Imperial Bureau of Entomology, has requested me to indentify four specimens of a Lygaeid sent to him by Dr. C. J. J. Van Hall from Java, where it was found among stored rice. It is a very distinct species and represents a new genus of which I here give figure and description.

Entomological investigations in the tropics usually entail a certain amount of difficulties not experienced in temperate regions, and it is often necessary to devise various kinds of apparatus to overcome these. The breeding cage described here was devised by myself as the result of a number of difficulties experienced in breeding experiments. Cages of this type have been in constant use in this laboratory for the past four years and have been found to meet almost every requirement. The ease with which they are constructed, together with the possibility of varying their size to suit one’s needs, as well as their portability, are all highly commendable features.

In 1915 (Bull. Ent. Res. vi, p. 131) Theobald described an Aphid taken on violets in Africa as Neotoxoptera violae. He has also recorded a statement by Davis that it probably is Rhopalosiphum violae, Pergande, 1900 (The Entomologist, xlix, p. 149).

The work of Dr. J. J. Simpson (Bull. Ent. Res. v, pp. 1–36 and Bull. Ent. Res. viii, pp. 193–214) has added largely to the knowledge of the bionomics of the larger blood-sucking insects of the Gold Coast, especially of the Northern Territories of the Colony, yet up to the present time, with the exception of the records obtained from one or two stations, singularly little is known with regard to the distribution in the Northern Territories of the smaller blood-sucking insects such as mosquitos and “sandflies.”

In three previous papers (Bull. Ent. Res. vii, pp. 1–18; viii, pp. 73–91; and viii, pp. 135–154) we have described early stages of a number of West African mosquitos collected at Accra and at other places in the Gold Coast. The present paper deals with a few more early stages of mosquitos, for the most part collected by one of us (A.I.) in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, and thus fills in a gap or two in the knowledge of the life-histories of these insects.

The history of tsetse-fly in Southern Rhodesia up to the present year (1918) continues on the whole to be one of expansion, although on the other hand one small, but important, belt appears to have become extinct. In addition, a fly area in the Moçambique Company's territory has extended up to our eastern border, with the result that serious losses of cattle from trypanosomiasis have occurred on the farms in that region. Detailed reports on the advance or retrogression of Glossina morsitans in other parts of Africa appear to be lacking, and it is felt that in view of the position of this territory in relation to tsetse-fly a review of the situation to the present day may not be without general interest.

For the last few months I have been using a beech tree-hole in Epping Forest as a source of supply of Anopheles plumbeus; and it has been our custom to collect larvae from the hole and transfer them to the laboratory at Sandwich, where the development is continued under artificial conditions. In this way we have been able to obtain large numbers of Anopheles plumbeus and Ochlerotatus geniculatus, together with the recently discovered Orthopodomyia albionensis as an associate. Not long after finding the Orthopodomyia, I was surprised to find yet another species from the same tree-hole, two male Stegomyia fasciata, emerging from the tank containing the mixed larvae from Epping Forest. The speciemens were of normal size, and we now have them preserved in our collection here.