﻿276 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 



the vote for Gladstone. " Why," said the Vice-Chancellor, " he 

 only pronounced the first syllable of Mr. Gladstone's name." 

 ** Yes, sir ; but he did not pronounce the first letter of Mr. 

 Hardy's." The same Magazine has an interesting article on 

 *' The Lore and Legend of Japanese Fire-Flies," and their 

 " Hunting Song " : — 



" Hotaru koi, Hotaru koi, 

 Ando no hikari wo choito mite koi." 



reminds one of our "Lady-bird, Lady-bird, fly away home." 

 These naturally become Golden-bugs in the land of the almighty 

 dollar. 



A newspaper notice just the other day informed all and 

 sundry that " The State of California has recently discovered the 

 great value of the ladybird as a destroyer of the plant-lice that 

 kill the fruit buds " : William Kirby discovered the same thing — 

 about 1820. The State wanted quantities, and their collectors 

 could find " cast-off shells " (presumably of pup?e) only. But, 

 on returning to the shells in the winter, they came across " a 

 peculiar snowball, with a nucleus of twigs and pine-needles. 

 The ball was broken open, and inside was found a squirming 

 mass of ladybirds. Four hundred pounds of ladybirds were dug 

 up in one day from under the snow and sent to Sacramento." 

 Whether the ball was made by Coccinellfe or Aphides is not 

 stated, but we should suspect the former to have rather devoured 

 the latter than that they themselves be a gall-making species, 

 and to have a penchant for a common prey rather than true 

 gregariousness. 



Lincolnshire is an extremely neglected county entomologi- 

 cally, and we have never met anyone who had collected aught 

 but Lepidoptera there. So we took a rush through it last June 

 to see its possibilities. Approaching from the south we slept at 

 Spalding and Boston, both considerable towns in the lap of very 

 thoroughly drained fens ; these fens stretch through the eastern 

 half of the county, and have been cultivated so long that we 

 failed to find in them a single fen, or uncommon, insect; to the 

 north-east Boston has some common agricultural country. The 

 fens dogged us through Wainfleet to Skegness, a modern seaside 

 resort with nothing to appeal to us but the sandhills and a little 

 heathy ground extending some five miles south, covered with 

 Hiippophte rhamnoides, with its peculiar Psylla ; the sand here is 

 very pale, and the Diptera frequenting it decidedly paler than 

 the same species are at Deal. At Mablethorpe we met the same 

 sand, though the height of the Eoman sea-wall sheltered addi- 

 tional insects. Two nights we stayed at Louth, a delightful 

 old-world town surrounded by charming country, of which the 



