26 THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST 



Among my brother's schoolmates was one whose life ambition was to be a 

 doctor, and already at. 15 he took his profession and things in general very 

 seriously. In the newcomer's friendship I had of course some share — a. jackal's 

 if not a lion's— and was allowed to attend the seances held in a room over his 

 father's coach-house. These seances were mostly of a chemical character, 

 accompanied by mephitic odours and ending in loud, glass-flying explosions. 

 Various creatures, birds and mammals, were boiled down and their bony anatomy 

 taken apart and then carefully reconstructed. His greatest treasure was a 

 human skeleton, begged, borrowed, and bought piecemeal and with great trouble; 

 it was far from perfect and some of the parts had been contributed (without 

 their consent) by lower animals; it was not even entirely of one sex, and its 

 age varied from a small boy's to an old woman's. This monstrous apparition 

 occupied a kind of dias at one end of the attic and never failed to lend an atmos- 

 phere of awe to this young Sawbones' feasts of reason. 



It was under his g'uidance that we made our way to quite distant points 

 in the country side, Streatham Common, Epsom, stretches of the river Mole 

 by Box Hill and Leatherhead, and Carshalton with its beautiful reaches of the 

 river Wandle, subject of one of Ruskin's most eloquent laments. His favorite 

 out-door hobby was fossil-hunting, and it was by that avenue that we were led 

 to our first view of the chalk downs near Caterham Junction. We took train 

 to Croydon and then tramcar a mile or two beyond. Here lay some chalk pits 

 in the side of a broad expanse of rolling heath. Many a long hour in the daz/ling 

 glare of the chalk did we spend, digging out sea-urchins, trilobites, ammonites, 

 anemones, sponges, corals, and shark's teeth from the walls of the pit, or raking 

 over refuse heaps. And, of course, it was not long before we discovered how 

 interesting were the downs that had covered this prehistoric chalk bed with 

 new and varied life. There were numbers of stone-chats, and plovers, and larks 

 about the thickets of gorse; once a hare being coursed, with backward-staring 

 eyes, sprang full against my legs as it mounted the hillside. On the downs w€ 

 captured several "hair-streaks" and "chalk-blues" that were entirely new to 

 our collection, and on the homeward trip one day we had an encounter that 

 capped them all for thrills. 



We had made our way down from the breezy heath into a hollow road 

 with high, uncut hedges on either side, and presently the road widened out 

 into two, an upper gravel road and a low wagon track, with a gentle slope of 

 short grass between. Up and down about this turfy space went flights of the 

 most beautiful creatures we had ever seen; they flew low and somewhat heavily, 

 an easy mark for the net. The forewings were deep indigo-green with large 

 spots of rich crimson, the hind wings entirely crimson, both pairs long and 

 narrow, gently rounded at the apex. It proved to be the 6-spot Burnet Moth, 

 one of the ZygcBnida, a family not xQvy well represented on our continent of 

 North America. 



The astonishing beauty of these Burnet Moths in the sunlit lane has helped 

 to impress the whole scene of this first encounter indelibly on the mind. Even 

 now as I bend my thought steadily on this remote point of the past, every detail 

 of the road stands out again like some invisible ink under the action of sunlight. 



