THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST 147 



Towards the end of May, Avhen the foliage was all out, I 

 tramped along the railway track to the east end of this place and 

 spent most of the sunny hours of one Saturday roaming about 

 the clearing. As I approached I could hear a man driving hard- 

 wood pickets into soggy ground in the heart of the swamp. The 

 sound went on all day (just west of the clearing) at regular inter- 

 vals. But in the clearing itself such abundance and variety of 

 leaf-eating beetles — especially Chrysomelas — I have never met 

 with. If Chrysomela means golden sheep, then this certainly was 

 the enchanted land of Colchis, for golden fleeces hung on every 

 tree; and if the word means golden apple, here was every branch 

 laden with gleaming fruit, a veritable garden of the Hesperides. 



Was the dragon that guarded the fruit asleep, or was it that 

 indefatigable laborer hammering stakes into the ground behind 

 the alder thicket? What good was a fence, anyway, in the heart 

 of such a swamp? When the sound of that incessant hammer kept 

 up till long after six o'clock, my curiosity got the better of me, 

 and, stealing through the cedars and poplars at the west end of 

 the clearing, I soon found myself on the edge of the municipal 

 ditch and only a few yards from the mysterious workman; he 

 stopped as soon as he saw me, and, without any warning, rose 

 into the air and flapped heavily a.way over the trees — a common 

 bittern; ten minutes later he was driving piles into the bank of 

 Lily Lake half a mile away. 



When I came to check over the day's bag of Chrysomelids — 

 a work whose successful completion was due to Dr. Bethune's kind 

 help — it was something like this. On willow in the clearing I had 

 taken about a dozen of Chrysomela multipnnctata — var. bigsbyana: 

 this form, with a dark thorax margined before and on the sides 

 with pale cream, and having the sutural stripe dark, I ha\'e never 

 taken on any other plant than the willow. On dogwood — out of 

 the scores seen — I had taken 8 of Chrysomela philadelphica: this 

 form I have always found on dogwood, and I have never taken 

 any other species of Chrysomela on that shrub; the whole thorax 

 is dark-bronzed (from green to black) and the elytra are without 

 the sutural stripe, though the scutellum is marked with a dark 

 spot. On spiraea I took two or three of what I thought to be this 

 same form, but they proved on examination to be the variety 



