THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 



it was in my second season as a collector that I first had the luck 

 to "strike ile," and it was right on that dogwood bush behind the 

 north fence of our road. I found here several specimens of a 

 Chrysomela rather smaller than scalaris with greenish-black head 

 and thorax, elytra cream-coloured and finely sculptured and dotted 

 with metallic greenish black; it proved to be Chrysomela Phila- 

 delphia!, and a short search anomg dogwood shrubs yielded me 

 some 50 specimens of the beetle. This was at the end of June, and 

 in July I migrated with all my bug-and-weed paraphernalia to the 

 Rideau Lakes. It wasn't long before I found grazing on basswood 

 leaves, along with walking-stick insects, whole flocks of a small 

 whitish larva, marked with black, somewhat louse-shaped and so 

 strongly resembling the larva of the Potato-beetle that visions of 

 Chrysomela scalaris began again to float before my excited imagina- 

 tion and to haunt my dreams. I separated about 15 of the best- 

 grown lambs of the flock and shepherded them home to a domestic 

 fold. But they seemed to scorn captivity and quite obviously 

 pined in their cardboard box. Twice a day I brought them iresh 

 fodder from their native pasture, but they wouldn't browse worth 

 a cent, and I lost one or two with every moult; less than halt a 

 dozen reached maturity, and of these two died in pupating. How- 

 ever, three emerged safely and proved the realization of my dream, 

 Chrysomela scalaris, all the more lovely in being home-grown. 

 The knowledge that hundreds of these creatures must have ma- 

 tured about basswood trees where I had made my captures drew 

 me out to their feeding grounds again. This time I searched in 

 vain, not a larva could I see on any of the leaves, still less a mature 

 insect, for the full-fed larva in this genus drops' to the ground in 

 order to pupate, and though it was the beetle itself that I had 

 found gregarious on the dogwood, there seemed to be no such luck 

 in the case of this species; at the end of two hours I was still empty- 

 handed. It was when I was passing across a stubble-field in the 

 open, from one part of the edge of the wood to another, that I felt 

 -something crawling on the back of my neck. Of course, gentlemen, 

 you all know the extraordinary phenomenon of an insect crawling 

 on the back of the neck. No matter how rare it may have been 

 when it first settled, if once you reach with your hand to make a 

 capture it nearly always — well, if you wish for an exact figure, in 



