112 ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS. [May, 



dollar per ounce; a cheap pine handle for a net cost twenty-five 

 cents; empty cigar boxes were ten cents each; potassium cyanide 

 could not be purchased, except by a special permit from the 

 mayor, while the native alcohol was too weak to do anything but 

 put on a temporary drunk the specimens immersed in it. 



It was the late afternoon of the 2oth of July when our party 

 of four, after a long ride of over 3100 miles, passed down the 

 slope of the Mexican railway and entered Orizaba, one of the 

 most charming of the smaller cities of Mexico, situated as it is in 

 a little valley in a semi-tropical region 4000 feet above sea level, 

 and surrounded on every side by lofty mountains. Our hopes 

 were high for the real work of the party, namely, the collecting 

 of the different forms of animal and plant life of the region was 

 to begin on the morrow. Those hopes were somewhat dampened, 

 however, by the information that the rainy season was but well 

 begun, and that the chances were that it would rain every day 

 for a month or longer. 



The first insect seen, after we had found a hotel where English 

 was spoken and had washed some of the dust and cinders of the 

 journey from us, was a handsome male of Dynastes tityus Linn, 

 which the landlord, who was in high good humor at getting the 

 four of us for the modest sum of fourteen dollars each per week 

 to partake of his hospitality, brought alive to me. He assured 

 me that his brother, who resides at Mexico City and has the 

 largest collection of Coleoptera in the country, had sold,scores 

 of them in Europe for five dollars a pair, but when I informed 

 him that the same species is found frequently in Kentucky, and 

 at times in southern Indiana, he seemed somewhat taken back. 

 However, he graciously presented it to me and volunteered to 

 accompany me after the seven o'clock dinner for a stroll about 

 the electric lights, where, he assured me, numerous specimens of 

 tityus, as well as of many other large beetles, were to be found. 



When we set out to visit the lights the rain was falling in a 

 steady shower; but few insects were flying, and they were mostly 

 the smaller moths. A half dozen or more large brown beetles, 

 a species of Xyloryctes which I afterwards found to be very com- 

 mon were, however, taken from the ground beneath the lights, 

 and a few earwigs from the walls of the houses from which the 

 light was reflected. 



On the morrow, as soon as our breakfast of bread and coffee, 



