8 ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS. [Jan., 'oj 



to establish a rule whereby to locate a single one. There is 

 no time of day it is not on deck ; the noise of his wings in 

 the night can be heard twenty feet away, whereas his flight in 

 daytime is almost without sound. The length of his life is 

 about three months, commencing on the 6th of July, when 

 I found the first one while raking away leaves for a garden- 

 bed. I concluded that this time of year they might be hidden 

 under leaves, and so I started to rake leaves. I think I worked 

 about ten hours, raked over a half acre of ground and never 

 found another ; this did not cure me, however, for at odd times 

 I tried it again, and may have raked over in all about two 

 acres without getting another, although I found some other 

 good things, among them a litter of skunks under a log. The 

 next find I made was a fine female, sitting at the foot of a large 

 oak. This gave me the idea to examine all the old oaks for a 

 mile either way along the Canon, but no sign of bcycri; the 

 fact is, I found only three on the bark of trees ; one, six feet 

 up, the other twenty feet. I also found them in the road or 

 trail, several crushed by animals, but all wide apart, as to 

 both space and time. I found them copulating on the high 

 branches of young' and old oak ; this set me to look at trees 

 for miles and for days without result, except disgust. For 

 several days I did not look for them, but collected other ma- 

 terial, yet the habit once formed for looking for certain things 

 persists so strongly that I could not keep from watching the 

 tree tops. Although I was not thinking of Phtsiotis bcycri, 

 my eye caught the forms of two hugged close among the leaves. 

 Before I had made up my mind how to take them, I saw two 

 more higher up, and I felt like an Apache roasting a lot of 

 sheep guts on a bed of hot coals. Thinking this the right time 

 to hunt him good and hard, I looked for a week and did not 

 get one. Later I found one here, one there; hanging to the 

 dead stalk of a columbine, on the top of a bare precipice, in 

 a prospect hole, an old well in a privy, a blacksmith shop, 

 and one day in an old shoe. This is the way of bcycri, he is 

 everywhere and nowhere in particular. When he walks on the 

 ground he reels like a drunkard, and when he rolls over on 



