88 



A. Watson in the American Home Garden, says that the most promising remedy is to 

 "pave closely under the tree with clam or oyster shells, the instinct of the insect leading 

 it to avoid depositing its eggs in fruit from which, when they drop, its progeny can find 

 no safe retreat." Mr. Downing speaks of plum trees growing in hard trodden court- 

 yards which usually bear plentiful crops. Some have also recommended the use of chips 

 and small pieces of wood placed around the trees as traps for the curculio, but it is very 

 doubtful if any of these methods will ever take the place of jarring. 



:nature printed butterflies. 



By James Fletcher, Ottawa, Ont. 



The season of warm days, flowers, and butterflies is over now, and the look-out is 

 cold, bleak and bare. Apparently there is little for the scientific lover of nature to do in 

 the way of collections at this time of year ; such however is far from being actually the 

 case, as all who have collected will testify. It is in fact one of the busiest seasons for 

 collectors. All the treasures gathered during the summer months have to be gone through. 

 In the first place those known have to be taken out and sorted away into their proper 

 places in the cabinet ; the remainder then have to be re-sorted and divided up into sets 

 according to the families to which they appear to belong, and after this they have to be 

 examined critically and if possible identified. It frequently happens that a collector of 

 butterflies has an opportunity of capturing a large number of some local species, in one 

 day, and finds it impossible or irksome to set them all before they become too dry, as they 

 will in a very short time in hot weather. When they are once dry, too, one is apt to think 

 that as they can get no worse they may safely be put aside until some more convenient 

 occasion to be relaxed and set up, but this convenient occasion, like a good many others, 

 is sometimes very long coming, and many valuable specimens are thus lost. An 

 ac«ident which occurred to the glass of one of my butterfly cabinet drawers lately, 

 was the means of reminding me of a process shewn me some years ago by a Cap- 

 tain Lloyd, of the English Navy. The accident referred to was the breaking of the 

 cover of one of my cases which contained some rare butterflies, in consequence of which 

 it was impossible to close the door of the cabinet tightly. My horror can be better 

 imagined than expressed when, upon opening the door and pulling out this drawer, about 

 a fortnight after \vards, I found that there was not a single perfect specimen in it — a 

 mouse had got in and what was once a neatly arranged case of butterflies was now 

 nothing but a chaos of nibbled bodies, loose wings, pins, and labels. I had not the heart 

 at first to throw out these fragments and so wipe out entirely the pleasing recollections 

 each brouo-ht up in my mind of rambles through the woods and in the country ; so care- 

 fully o-athering up the wings I put them away in a little box. The idea then struck me 

 of printing them as I had seen my old friend do them — and as I think it would be a very 

 convenient way for Entomologists and agriculturists to send butterflies for identification, 

 when spare duplicates are to be had, I am induced to send a description of the modus 

 operandi. Take the insect in your left hand, holding it beneath the thorax, then with a pair 

 of sharply-pointed scissors cut off" the wings as close to the body as possible ; occasionally, 

 unless the scissors are very sharp, some of the muscles are torn away from the thorax with 

 the wings, these must be carefully removed ; arrange the wings in pairs and put them 

 with the body on one side in some convenient place where they may be easily got at when 

 you are ready for them. Now take a piece of white paper of the size required, and fold it 

 in two like a sheet of note paper, then with a camel-hair brush lay on a thin wash of per- 

 fectly clear gum arable, fold down the upper half and pass the hand lightly over it so as 

 to spread the gum evenly between the two sides ; now re-open it, and taking up the wings 

 with the tip of the brush, the lower ones first, arrange them carefully in the position 

 wanted, leaving space enough intervening between the two pairs to paint in the body 

 afterwards. Spare no pains in arranging the wings ; this corresponds with " setting " for 

 a cabinet. I have seen many good collections of insects, made by amateurs, rendered al- 

 most useless by the want of a little thought on this point. The proper position for a but- 



