632 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



another form of the simple attraction of a lamp upon a draw- 

 ing-room table. (The arc light also appears to draw the 

 large earth-worms out of the ground, so that lads in New 

 York now collect them for fishermen.) 



I therefore determined to experiment with the lamp with 

 wings. I write now in October, and I began the experi- 

 ment last month. I had a lamp constructed with movable 

 wings. I then covered the wings with castor-oil, and placed 

 the lamp upon the verandah of my house. The large moth 

 Porina cervinata came and duly fastened itself on to the 

 wings, and then carefully wriggled off on to the floor, where it 

 crawled about apparently not much hurt, but, in my house- 

 keeper's opinion, doing much harm to the clean appearance of 

 the boards by covering them with oil-tracks. 



Next night I determined to give up the sticking process, 

 and see how a milk-dish containing a little kerosene placed 

 beneath the lamp to catch the moths as they fell would 

 answer. I must say this plan worked like a charm. The 

 moths dashed themselves against the lamps, and fell into the 

 kerosene and were immediately killed. I should think I de- 

 stroyed eight hundred to one thousand moths that night. I 

 have also tried soap-and-w^ater, which acts excellently, but it 

 is as well to grease the top-sides of the dish with castor-oil, 

 and the v^ings as well. Treacle, soap, honey, castor-oil, and 

 kerosene can each be tried at will. You will see by the 

 apparatus on the table that the dish, wings, and lamp are 

 fixed together, so that they form one machine, easily hung in 

 any tree. Two such machines, shifted from tree to tree, 

 should clear an ordinary-sized orchard of. moths. As the 

 apples are now forming, the machines should at once be made 

 use of, as I am not at all sure but that the codlin-moth begins 

 to lay its eggs in the eye and on the skin of the apple as soon 

 as it is fairly formed. 



I have caught two to three thousand different-sized moths 

 in one night, but this only rarely. The best nights are dark 

 damp nights. On bright moonlight cold nights in September 

 and October moths do not come out. Many of the moths 

 were very small, and great numbers settled about the veran- 

 dah in the vicinity of the lamp ; these we killed the next 

 morning. As these moths would have laid about five hundred 

 eggs on the average, to develope hereafter into grass-eating 

 worms or caterpillars, I calculated that I had destroyed in 

 that one night 1,250,000 worms. Let us say that two hundred 

 of the apparatus are exposed in the Wairarapa district for 

 thirty nights during spring, summer, and autumn, and five 

 hundred moths are caught each night. This, at an average 

 of five hundred eggs, would give 200 x 30 x 500 x 500 = 

 1,500,000,000 eggs destroyed. After this field-moth has laid 



