_Mamestra ewingii_ is typical of another large world wide genus. Its larvae are among our most destructive cut-worms to crops and grass: it is a pale slate-coloured moth, marked with short parallel lines of a darker tint on the tips of the wings. _Spodoptera exempta_ was figured in the Agricultural Gazette 1898 under the name of _Phlegetona carbo_. It is one of our climbing cut-worms, and in that year the caterpillars swarmed all over the Camden and South Coast districts of N.S. Wales. They are very active grubs, olive green to almost black in colour, striped on the sides with fine yellow lines; and when full grown measure 1½ inches in length. The moth is under 1½ inches across the wings; is of a general dark brown tint, indistinctly mottled all over the fore wings with yellowish or sometimes silvery grey scales; the hind wings are silvery and semitransparent. _Prodenia littoralis_ is a handsome moth of about the same dimensions as the last; the fore wings are dark brown finely striped and pencilled with grey lines; the hind pair pearly white. The moth often lays her eggs upon the foliage of apple and other trees; the young on hatching out feed upon the foliage but afterwards make their way to the ground. _Plusia verticillata_ is a species that feeds upon the foliage of peas, beans, and potatoes; the slender pale green grub differs from the typical “cut-worm” in moving about like a “looper,” and when full grown pupates in a flimsy silken cocoon it spins upon the under surface of the leaf. The moth, measuring 1½ inches across the wings, has the fore pair brown tinted with mauve, marbled with a coppery tint, and with two elongate oval spots of silvery white scales in the centre of each, and fine lines behind; the hind wings are dark brown fringed with grey down. _Plusia argentifera_ is a smaller form with a silvery mark in the centre of each fore wing. The handsome dark brown caterpillar of _Calogramma festiva_, which was figured by Donovan in his “Insects of New Holland,” feeds upon the foliage of the Crinea lilies; they are sometimes plentiful in the Botanic Gardens. This moth measures 1½ inches across the wings, and is of a uniform pale creamy-yellow colour, thickly mottled on the base of the wings with red and black. We now come to a curious allied group, the OPHIDERINAE, the members of which are known as the “Orange-piercing moths”; they are large handsome insects with the head and thorax thickly clothed with scales forming a regular crest, and furnished with a proboscis which, pointed and barbed at the tip, enables them to thrust it through the rind of oranges and other ripe fruit and suck up the juice. Tryon has figured and written an interesting account of these moths in the Queensland Agricultural Journal Vol. ii. 1898. [Illustration: =Fig. 132.=--Life History of the Bean Moth, _Plusia verticillata_ (Guérin). Showing the half looper form of the caterpillar, and the loose silken cocoon of the pupa.]