THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 67 



of course), I had three or four small ones in use, with which I did 

 most of the capturing, bottling from off the lamp shade, the table, walls, 

 etc. It was often necessary to put these bottles over some good thing 

 sitting on the floor, the window sill, or the shelves of my bookcase, and 

 to have that number in constant use. As soon as the specimen covered 

 or bottled v/as quiet, it was transferred to one of the large bottles, and 

 the small one was ready for use again. I found it desirable to take up 

 my carpet, owing to the quantity of insects that came in in July, and 

 which littered the floor ; often trodden under foot during the evening 

 (some good things came to grief in this way), or succumbing to the dry 

 heat of the room during the night or following day. I had to make 

 " sweeps " of the slain occasionally, they made such a mess ; an examina- 

 tion of the dustpan before consignment of its contents to the fire, some- 

 times revealed some specimen worth keeping ; it was in this way that I 

 secured two out of the four specimens taken of Tapinostola variana. On 

 some evenings I think all the mosquitoes of the neighbourhood found their 

 way in at my window, and assisted in making things lively for me ; and 

 the number of things flying about the room, or dashing around the lamp, 

 was quite bewildering, and not conducive to coolness. Besides these 

 pests (the mosquitoes) several species of Ichneumonidee put in an appear- 

 ance, on some evenings in numbers ; and while they did not seem to be 

 attracted to the lamp particularly, they kept on the move about the room, 

 making considerable noise on the walls and ceiling. Perhaps the worst 

 visitors of all were some of the large Dytiscidaj and Lachnosterna fusca. 

 In September several kinds of water-flies came to the light in numbers. 



Some peculiarities of this mode of collecting were noticed, and may 

 be worth mentioning. One thing I observed particularly, when I put in 

 a good long evening at it, was the occasional lull, of greater or lesser dur- 

 ation, when hardly anything seemed to be moving outside, judging by the 

 scarcity of things coming in ; then all of a sudden a fresh lot, of all kinds 

 and conditions, would come swarming about the lamp. Some nights 

 there would be a succession of the same species, one after the other, for 

 a short time, as if they had been playing at " Follow my leader," and then 

 not another would be seen that night. Again, a species would come in 

 one evening in fair numbers, and then never show up again ; others just 

 one or two only in the same way. Two most striking examples of the 

 latter were lanassa lignicolor and Noctua plecta ; in both cases three 

 specimens were taken within a few minutes, and no others were seen on 

 that or other evenings. Other species, again, appeared to occur in about 



