NOTES—ORIGINAL AND SELECTED.
93
to 1 inch in length. Mr. Cole has since identified the cater-
pillars as those of the "Winter Morth" (Cheimatobia brumata)
and the ants as Formica vufa—the Wood-ant. The ants were
very pugnacious, and those with burdens absolutely refused
to give up their prize, even when their lives were in
danger. The "looper" caterpillars were obtained from
an oak tree about seven yards east of the path, and
the column of ants was clearly defined, and much
narrower in the undergrowth. The ants were scaling the tree
in thousands, and had evidently a preference for one particular
oak, though two others, a few yards distant, were attacked, but
not in such great force. On the other side of the path the
column stretched out to an ant-hill, and the total distance from
the nest to the oak tree was 15 yards. An ant seized a cater-
pillar by a loose fold of skin under the body, and putting its legs
astride it dragged its burden along in the same manner as a boy
"rides" a toy horse. In cases where the caterpillar was very
large, two ants set to work, one at each end of the "looper's"
body. The scene of the "raid" was visited on the three
following days, and the tiny robbers were found hard at work on
each occasion.—H. Whitehead, Essex Museum of Natural
History.
BOTANY.
Variation in Adoxa.—The common form of the inflores-
cence of the Moscatel (Adoxa moschatellina) consists of five
flowers forming a globose head. The peculiarity about the
plant is that the flowers have two forms of symmetry, viz., the
tetramerous and the pentamerous types, both of which occur on
the same plant. In the normal inflorescence the terminal flower
is tetramerous and the four lateral flowers are pentamerous.
Some material was collected during the Spring of 1902, with a
view to studying the variation of this plant. Inflorescences were
collected at Chiselhurst, Kent; Caterham, Surrey; and at
Theydon Garnon, Essex; and it was found that considerable
variation occurs both in the number of flowers and also in the
number of the parts of the perianth. Out of 1,071 inflorescences,
only 934, or 87.2 per cent, possessed the normal number of
flowers, viz., five. The number of flowers per inflorescence
ranged from three to ten.
The number of divisions of the corolla varied from three to