THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 79 



Accordingly I procured a quart bottle with as wide a mouth as pos- 

 sible — a fruit jar would have done very well — put in it enough lumps of 

 common fused cyanide of potassium to cover the bottom, and having 

 poured upon this about an inch of plaster of Paris mixed with plenty of 

 water, I had only to await nightfall to commence operations. 



The large poison-bottle worked to a charm ; scarcely a moth escaped 

 which I desired to take. With the new instrument I became impatient of 

 the time required to take out and pin each specimen as soon as stupefied, 

 and tried the experiment of capturing every uninjured moth seen and 

 allowing them to remain in a layer upon the plaster until it was convenient 

 to return to the house and sort them over, taking a moderate amount of 

 care that they should not be unnecessarily shaken up in carrying. 



Rather unexpectedly I found that this treatment did not seem to injure 

 or rub the specimens in the least degree, though sometimes nearly a 

 hundred moths of all sorts and sizes would be piled together, making a 

 stratum an inch or two thick in the bottle. 



After this discovery night collecting became easy, nets and boxes were 

 left at home, and the only necessary articles were a lantern and the poison- 

 bottle. Arrived at a tree and carefully turning the light upon the sugared 

 patch, I selected out such moths as seemed desirable, and, removing the 

 stopper, gently touched them from below with the open bottle. When 

 they had flown down into the receptacle, the cork was replaced and the 

 specimens were thus safely disposed of till the following morning, when 

 they could be sorted over at leisure. 



Occasionally a very wary moth would fly away at the first approach of 

 artificial light, and I endeavored with laudanum and hydrate of chloral 

 to so stupefy them that they could be readily taken. The laudanum was 

 rather too effective, seeming to intoxicate them ; at any rate, after imbibing 

 the mixture, the moths fell off the tree and sprawled around in the grass 

 in a very absurd manner, quite unable to fly away ; but still most of them 

 managed to go a considerable distance, and so were lost in the grass. The 

 hydrate of chloral had no effect whatever upon them ; some moths which 

 took a considerable quantity of a very concentrated solution — about equal 

 bulks of the salt and of water — remained unaffected. 



Sometimes ants were troublesome, biting the trunks of the moths as 

 they fed, and causing them to fly away. In these cases a dose of laudanum 

 was generally effective in driving off the ants for a considerable time- 



