76 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 



were then put into a greenlaouse, the temperature of which was at a 

 guess 60 or 70 degrees hy day, and 50 or 00 degrees by night. Here 

 they were watered, but without any regularity. The moths all 

 emerged in November. Two of the pupae were left in the earth, but I 

 made it easy for the moths to escape by scraping away the soil until I 

 broke open the top of the cocoon. The other two pupje were placed 

 among moss. Some trouble was taken to provide ladders, so that the 

 freshly emerged moths would be able to climb up them and obtain a 

 firm hold whilst the process of inflation of the wings was going on. 

 One of the larvte, when I received it in a box by post, should then 

 have been underground. It had shrunk a good deal, and was quite 

 unable to crawl. Instead of burying it in earth I just put it on a sheet 

 of paper in the dark and it pupated all right. What interested me 

 most about these insects was the seemingly unnecessarily large 

 cocoon or cavity which they scooped out. This has been already 

 referred to in your pages. The cavity looked quite capable of holding 

 three pupje easily instead of one. The interior is not smooth, but 

 pitted all over with little indentations, which are, I suppose, the prints 

 made by the feet of the larva, when it is enlarging the cavity by 

 beating back the walls. — W. M. Christy; Watergate, Emsworth, Hants. 



British Orthoptera. — Mr. M. Burr ((mte, p. 28) mentions Meconema 

 variuni, Fab., being taken at sugar. Twice last season I took the same 

 species by the same means : on Aug. 14th in the New Forest ; and on 

 Oct. 10th in Richmond Park. Platijcleis bracln/ptcra I have been accus- 

 tomed to take in fair numbers in two localities near Esher, Surrey. 

 Last season, however, it was apparently absent from one ; the other I 

 did not examine. One locality is by the side of a boggy pond ; the 

 other is on an open sandy spot. In both cases, however, the insect is 

 taken on Erica tctmlid-, which grows luxuriantly in each place. — W. 

 J. Lucas; 21, Knight's Park, Kingston-on-Thames, Feb. 10th, 1897. 



High Flat- setting. — Mr. Warburg, in his plea for the adoption of 

 flat setting on the ground that it would save him (and others) much 

 trouble [ante, p. 45), appears to have lost sight of the immense 

 amount of labour it would impose upon those who, as collectors of 

 British Lepidoptera only, adopt the curved style. And not only this, 

 what a number of our, in many cases, best specimens would sufl'er or 

 be completely spoiled in the process, the "blues" for instance. On 

 this ground alone we might well hesitate, however much we felt 

 inclined to meet the wishes of foreign collectors ; but, as I said before, 

 we cannot all go in for foreign insects as well as our own, and we who 

 have to rest content with the latter think it desirable to adhere to our 

 present method of setting. Were we to admit continental types and 

 series into our cabinets, which proceeding might or might not (pro- 

 bably the latter) prevent extermination of some of our species, it 

 would be but the insertion of the thin end of the wedge that would 

 surely eventually bring everything down to the continental level, a 

 result greatly to be deplored. It would also, to my mind, greatly 

 facilitate the palming off upon us by unscrupulous persons of con- 

 tinental or foreign specimens (common enough there) as British-taken 

 rarities, a thing even now sometimes difficult to guard against. I 

 would suggest that entomologists who net in the curved style, and 



