4 THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST 



had been the favorite hunting lodge of Queen Elizabeth; and, indeed, astride 

 the back of that letter "n" in the middle of the word "Rosendale," the curious 

 linguist may wing his way back not merely to the days of Good Queen Bess, 

 when doubtless the place was still a valley of roses, but to a time in Old Eng- 

 land long before Chaucer when the plural of "rose" was "rosen." 



East of us the wooded estates of Edward Alleyn, Shakespeare's friend and 

 fellow actor, were not yet all built over. There were still shady slopes on 

 Gypsy Hill, and though the gypsies with their picturesque tents had vanished 

 forever before a standing army of red and yellow brick houses, the nightingale 

 still sought its ancestral home there among the trees each spring and made 

 music in the land. Beautiful woods still flourished near the Crystal Palace 

 at Sydenham, and an oak grove within the school playground itself, where the 

 voice of the earliest cuckoo might be heard and even its elusive form spied in 

 stealthy flight from tree to tree. 



In that same ground, quite close to the Chatham and Dover railway I got 

 my first sight of gaily spotted newts in a neglected clay pond, and once caught 

 in the long grass a beautiful green lizard. It was from here too that I gathered, 

 feeding in a clump of small-headed purple thistles, part of a colony of Black- 

 spined caterpillars to rear at home. The list of British butterflies is a very 

 meagre one compared with that of a great continent like North America, and 

 even of that meagre list quite a number of species were unknown in our part of 

 Scotland. There was frantic joy in the house when these dark thorny cater- 

 pillars, after a short pupation emerged into the most beautiful "Painted Ladies" 

 (Vanessa cardiii). One of the most amazing things to watch was the way they 

 shot out a secretion of pink milk at emergence, squirting it over their wings to 

 saturate them before the work of unfolding and stretching could be safely 

 embarked on. 



The whole neighborhood was largely residential ; the houses all had gardens 

 enclosed by fences of narrow oak lattice overlapping vertically and topped with 

 a narrow coping of the same; shade-trees — mostly elm, poplar, willow and 

 linden — abounded about the roads; many of the gardens boasted trees and 

 shrubbery, and these wooden fences made a surprisingly good cover for insects 

 at all stages; but, especially, I recall the number and variety of chrysalids to 

 be found in the angle of the coping. We used to tramp the sidewalks for miles, 

 running our eye along this groove by the hour, once in a while glancing down the 

 vertical lines just to take the crick out of our neck and corral any stray game 

 that we might have overlooked on the surface of the fence. 



Among other captures made in this way, I recall the Goat Moth, the Leopard 

 Moth, the Lappet and Oak-egger. The Goat Moth (Cossus ligniperda) was a 

 large dark-grey creature, whose larva bores in willow and poplar, has a lurid 

 brown-crimson hue, an evil odor, and the enviable reputation of having been 

 eaten by the Romans; we often saw the dark-brown gutterings, like trickles of 

 tobacco juice, at the mouth of their burrows in the poplar trunks. There is in 

 Ontario a closely related genus of the Cossid family in the common Prionoxystus 

 rohiniae, which I found abundant one summer on Trout Island in the Rideau and 

 occasionally about Port Hope, infesting poplars more often than the locust tree; 

 the Cossus itself occurs in two species of North America, Cossus centerensis, a 

 small moth of the Atlantic States, and Cossus undosus of the Rockies. The 



