1 895.] ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS. 313 



trates the surrounding country and its effect upon vegetation is 

 quite marked. Trees that have put on their livery of green 

 twenty-five miles away are here but showing the swelling bud. 

 Plant life has forced its way to the surface in sheltered nooks; 

 the lawns have taken on their tinge of green, but the chill air 

 seems to call a halt until some day a balmy zephyr from the great 

 prairies of the Dakotas drifts this way and overcoats are laid 

 aside. The zephyr may increase to a gale all the better for our 

 purpose. Its effect on all life is magical, Spring has come. Busi- 

 ness hours are cut as short as possible, and every one does honor 

 to the occasion in his own sweet way. For my part I wait pa- 

 tiently, knowing that after the first day of heat thousands, yes, 

 millions of insects, warmed by the gentle breath of Spring will 

 seek every point of vantage from which to spread their wings, 

 and I know full well that as soon as they circle out from the pro- 

 tecting brush and tree, some life-giving wave of air will carry 

 them far out over the icy waters of the lake where they alight or 

 fall exhausted. This continues during the three days which these 

 early warm waves last; then the reaction comes. The heated 

 air rises, the cold lake air rushes in driving away by its chill all 

 signs of insect life, but with it comes a vast horde of hapless ones, 

 infinite in numbers, and often of great variety. You stand upon 

 the sandy beach at the edge of the water a piece of driftwood 

 floats in like a ship of state, for it carries many a royal passenger; 

 the wave that casts it at your feet takes back as toll two-thirds 

 of the passengers, but there are enough left to satisfy the most 

 exacting collector; besides, why wait for ships of state when the 

 beach is" fairly covered with fragments under which lie a great 

 variety, and from which one has only to avoid the common spe- 

 cies. A barrel-hoop projecting from the sand furnished over 

 thirty specimens of the smaller sorts, the larger ones resorting 

 to the ends and tops of half buried logs. The afternoon of which 

 I write I secured forty-three specimens of Harmonia \^-guttata 

 and twenty-six of H. maculata. Usually one particular beetle 

 predominates; this time it was the female of Corymbites virens, 

 one might have taken a pint of them alone. It was two weeks 

 later before I secured the males in quantity from tag alder bushes 

 by beating. Anatis i^-punctata were also very numerous. One 

 year Dicerca divaricata lay about the sands, sometimes a dozen 

 in a single footstep, but these had not been in the water, but 



