4 THE CAUSES WHICH PROPAGATE 



coimtiy air, so true a clironiele of the waxing and waning of 

 surrounding life. The opening page informed me that the Peacock 

 Butterfly first displayed its blue inlaid eyes among the garden 

 plots on the 25th of February of that year ; and that the woolly- 

 bear caterpillars of the Tiger Moth were observed hurrying over 

 their fleshy dock-leaves before the 7th of March. Easter 

 Monday, falling on the 13tli of April, was the epoch of finding 

 a violet-ringed Oak Eggar caterpillar. On the 22nd the grey 

 moth LUhorJiiza was at the crevice of its accustomed paling, 

 and the second week in May brought out on the landscape the 

 beautiful Orange Tip and the two commoner Cabbage Whites. 

 This springtide is then on the next sheet, unwittingly thrown 

 into contrast with the ensuing, which proved much more back- 

 ward; for the Brimstone Butterfly was not awake and flitting 

 along his sequestered lanes before the 17th of March, when the 

 large Tortoiseshells were already sunning high up on the rustling 

 elms at the porch, nor was the first annual brood of smaller 

 Tortoiseshells capering along the warm river embankments 

 before the 21st of June. On the day following a heavy-flighted 

 six-spot Burnet Moth was put up in the flowering grass with 

 yellow-wing spots instead of red — a certain mark to the adept 

 of previous uncongenial conditions ; and then as by magic the 

 Black-veined Butterflies were everywhere, in the river marshes, 

 at the wood side, and at the coach gate — a species I never met 

 with in the locality before or after. The year 1865 will be 

 remembered by entomologists as an annus mirahilis of Death^s 

 Heads, Humming Bird Hawks, and Gamma Moths ; and the 

 exceeding abundance of the latter Bacchanalian revellers allowed 

 me to remark their singular habit of passing the mornings on 

 the common lands and meadows, where they sunk into inactivity 

 at noontide. But no sooner came on the lapse of soft and 

 invigorating twilight than they hastened in shoals to the scent 

 distilling from the petunia beds, where stragglers lingered 

 probing the flowers until early dawn. 



Before this property — whose venerable volumes, drilled by 

 the silvery worm and redolent of the days of Johnson and of 

 Addison, still breathe from the shelves around me — had with its 

 yachting, driving, and shooting, passed to other and happier 

 possessors, the tide of land enclosure insensibly setting in around 



