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36
FORBES: Subspecies
Vol.10: nos.1-2
were the source of speciation. I have never seen any evidence presented to support this assumption; personally, I believe it only a minor source of new species (as against other isolating mechanisms, chiefly biological), and consider this feature of the Code a great hindrance to sound biological thinking.
I should personally suggest, then, some very different reforms: 1) recognize no holotypes of subspecies, but consider subspecific names based only on the whole block of material on which they were originally defined; 2) find some means of allowing a shift of "type locality" where the actual locality turns out to lie in a blend-zone; 3) redefine "trinomial" to include all nameable units below species and recommend the insertion of a vernacular word between the species and variety name to indicate the category of variety (as believed by the given writer); — this interpolated word not to be considered part of the name and to be changed as needed by increased knowledge.
Thus for instance we have the Green Swallowtail: Papilio philenor, and the lower name hirsutus. This latter is now considered the California race; in fact the hirsute condition is an early spring one both east and west, but it happens that early specimens are rare in the east, and the late ones rare and very local in the west. So I consider it a personal matter whether one writes "philenor spring form hirsutus" or "philenor race hirsutus".
16 Garden St., Cambridge 38, Mass., U. S. A.
Bishop SKAT HOFFMEYER, of Aarhus, Denmark, lectured on biology of Danish Lepi-doptera to the New Haven Entomological Society in October 1954, while visiting the United States. In the course of his engrossing talk, he told of an astonishing recent experiment by a Danish observer and kindly promised to send us the information for the News when it had been published. The note, by P. L. JORGENSEN, has now appeared, and the English summary sent by Bishop HOFFMEYER follows.
SUMMARY
ACANTHOPSYCHE ATRA LARV^ HATCHED FROM BIRDS' EXCREMENTS This paper describes a probable method of dispersal of Lepidoptera species with wingless females. It was observed that the females of Acanthopsyche atra L. (Psychidae) leave their sacs a few days after pairing. They drop to the ground, where they are easily discovered by birds. Eleven of these fertilized females were fed to a captive Robin (Erithacus rubecula). Its fecal droppings from the following 24 hours were placed in a special cage. Once in a while they were sprinkled with water, and a fortnight later the first larvae hatched from the droppings. In all, 30 — 40 larvae were hatched, not a very big number, but enough to show that the species may be dispersed by birds in the way described.
C. L. Remington