THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST 111 



SOME OBSERVATIONS ON THE COLLECTING OF 189O. 



A combination of causes prevented me from doing my usual amount 

 of hunting around Hamilton last summer, and the reports of the collectors 

 there left with me the impression that I was not losing much. I took 

 many a stroll through the city, looking for, and expecting to find some- 

 thing, but invariably returned disappointed. 



I suspect that electric lights and sparrows are working a revolution in 

 city collecting. I was informed by a collector, whose duty takes him out 

 early in the morning, that unless he got to a light that was in close proxi- 

 mity to his work before the sparrows, he got nothing ; that they know the 

 location of all the lights as exactly as the City Engineer, and when they 

 have cleaned up one, they make straight for another ; and they are not 

 content to take merely what is on the ground, but will flutter up and 

 down the pole, and pick off what is at rest on it ; or perched on top of a 

 fence, they will survey carefully all below them, and the instant they see 

 an insect, they drop to a level with it, pick it oft', and mount the fence 

 again to devour it. 



The communications from other parts of the country, which I have 

 received since the season closed, indicate a general disappointment with 

 the result of the collectors' labours. 



On the 7th of June I went on a visit to the country, about sixteen 

 miles south of the city, staying to the 23rd. The weather was warm — the 

 first steady heat of the season. There was a bit of open woods close at 

 hand, to which I was a constant visitor, and found hunting there specially 

 interesting and profitable,a goodly number of different Lepidopters 

 almost daily emerging. 



Edema albifrons was in surprising numbers. Look in any direction, 

 and the eye would light on several of them sitting in their own peculiar 

 attitude when at rest, the wings rolled tightly round the body, the front 

 legs straightened out beneath them, supporting the forward part of the 

 insect at an angle to the object it rests on, the lime-grey colour of its 

 wings, and the light coloured, brown margined, singularly truncated head 

 end, giving it an exact resemblance to a bit of rotten twig sticking out 

 from the side of a tree. 



Another plentiful thing was Heterocampa guttivitta ; what most drew 

 my attention to this insect at this time, was the large proportion of de- 

 formed ones. We are often disappointed in rearing insects in confinement, 

 by having some of them deformed, and are apt to attribute the deformity 



