The glossy reddish-brown chrysalis is enclosed in a dingy coloured web-like cocoon, which is spun up among leaves or litter on the ground. Mr. R. Adkin found some of these cocoons spun up between the folds of an old brown blanket used as a covering for a rabbit hutch in winter. The moth emerges in June. Occasionally, in confinement, specimens will leave the chrysalis in the autumn instead of passing the winter therein, as they more usually do (Plate 76). A common and often abundant species over the greater part of the British Isles. Its range abroad extends through Central and Northern Europe, South Russia, and Tartary to Amurland, Corea, and West China. THE MUSLIN (_Diaphora mendica_). The early British authors knew this moth as the "Spotted Muslin" or "Seven Spot Ermine" (Harris, 1778). The male is dark brown or blackish, with a few usually obscure black dots on each wing. The female is silky white, with more clearly defined, and often more numerous, black dots (Plate 75, Figs. 4-6). On Plate 78 will be found figures of the rarer and more extreme aberrations of the female. Those represented by Figs. 3, 4, 6, 7, were reared some years ago by Mr. G. T. Porritt, of Huddersfield, who at the same time obtained a number of other interesting intermediate examples ("Trans. Ent. Soc. Lond.," 1889, p. 441, Pl. 14). Variation in the other direction is towards the complete suppression of the black dots; and I have seen specimens with only one such dot on each wing. In the var. _rustica_, shown on the same plate, it will be noted that the males assimilate somewhat to the female coloration; the specimens (Figs. 1, 2), were bred by Mr. Robert Adkin in 1887. This form was not known to occur in the British {154} Isles until 1885, when Mr. de V. Kane detected specimens in a collection of insects made in Co. Cork, Ireland. It was next heard of from Belfast, and then, in 1886, again, in Co. Cork, an example of each sex was taken. The female specimen laid eggs, and some of these were sent to Mr. Adkin, who not only was successful in rearing the moths, but in 1889 obtained a pairing between an almost white male _rustica_ and an ordinary English female. Only four eggs were laid, and from these two male moths resulted in May, 1890, both intermediate in colour between the two forms. In all its early stages _rustica_ is identical with ordinary _mendica_. Male specimens with pale yellowish grey coloured wings have been reared from eggs laid by a female captured at Eltham, Kent, exhibiting a tendency to the _rustica_ form. In the Barnsley district, Yorkshire, the males are paler than usual, but in the Sheffield area of the same county the males are black. From North Durham chrysalids, I have a smoky greyish form of the male.