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Ch. XXI.]

INSECTS OF NICARAGUA.

379

butterflies and beetles. Mr. W. C. Hewitson has described 25 new species, but no list of the whole of the butterflies known from Nicaragua has yet been published. In Coleoptera I made large collections, but the extensive families of the Elateridæ, Lamellicorns, and others are still uncatalogued, and very many species remain to be described. The only beetles that have been catalogued as yet with sufficient completeness to warrant any general conclusions are the Longicorns. I collected about 300 different species, and Mr. H. W. Bates has enumerated 242 of these in a paper "On the Longicorn Coleoptera of Chontales, Nicaragua," published in the "Transactions of the Entomological Society for 1872." In an interesting summary of the results he gives the following analysis of the range of the species:

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Omitting the peculiar species and those generally distributed in Tropical America, we have thus fortythree that are found in Chontales and in Mexico or the United States, and sixty-one that are found in Chontales

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and countries lying to the southward. The preponderance of southern forms is not so great as in the birds, but when we reflect on the large number of peculiar species, and that the Longicorns of the Atlantic slope of Costa Rica are yet scarcely known, it appears likely that many of the Chontales species will be found ranging southward across the San Juan river, and that the Insect fauna will be shown to have the same relations as the Bird fauna; for, as the Atlantic forest continues unbroken much further southward than northward, so will the insects peculiar to the forest region have a greater range in that direction.

Mr. Hollick has beautifully drawn on wood a few of the characteristic Longicorns of Chontales, all of them, with one exception (Polyrhaphis Fabricii), being as yet only known from that province, but probably extending into Costa Rica.

One of these, the lovely little Cosmisoma Titania, No. 7 in Plate, has been appropriately named after the Queen of the Fairies by Mr. Bates. It was first found by Mr. Janson, junior, who came out to Chontales purposely to collect the insects; and I afterwards obtained it in great numbers. The use of the curious brushes on the antennæ is not known. Another longicorn, about the same size (Coremia hirtipes), has its two hindmost legs greatly lengthened, and furnished with brushes: one I saw on a branch was flourishing these brushes in the air, and I thought at first they were two black flies hovering over the branch, my attention being taken from the body of the beetle by the movement of the brushes. Another fine longicorn, figured in Plate, Deliathis nivea,

looks as if made of pure white porcelain spotted with

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black. It was a rare beetle, one or two specimens each season being generally all that were taken; it was usually found on the leaves of young trees, from twelve to twenty feet from the ground. I have taken the rather heavy-bodied female by throwing a stone at it and causing it to fall within reach, but the male is more active on the wing, and it was long before I could obtain a specimen.

Amongst the insects of Chontales none are more worthy of notice than the many curious species of Orthoptera

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