160 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 
ENTOMOLOGICAL NOTES, CAPTURES, &c. 
CoLLECTING IN SuRREY.—Accompanied by Mr. W. H. Wright 
I went, during the second week in June, into the western portion 
of Surrey, where heather and fir obtain to such an extent that in 
places one might easily imagine oneself again on the Highland 
mountains. Very different, however, was the result of a couple 
of days’ stay in this neighbourhood to the numerous catches I 
had used to take with similar surroundings in Perthshire. One 
would hardly have believed it possible to have worked steadily, as 
we did, during the period we were there with such scanty results. 
The season is undoubtedly singularly backward, which may to 
some extent account for our ill-luck. On the evening of our 
arrival we sugared a most likely-looking locality on the edge of a 
large fir wood, and adjoining a fine tract of heather, with some 
amount of cultivation near. Having sugared about a hundred 
trees we amused ourselves by searching for moths which should, 
under ordinary circumstances, be found at rest-on the trunks of 
the firs; but with the exception of a few Scoparia ambigualis and 
a single Macaria liturata nothing was found. Later on at sugar 
one Tinea finistrella and one Agrotis exclamationis were the only 
representatives of the great order Lepidoptera. Such bad success 
has seldom fallen to our lot, and considering that the evening was 
everything to be desired, viz. dull and warm, I can only attribute 
the scarcity of species either to the backwardness of the season 
or to the bad series of years which we have had lately. We can 
but infer that the moths have become partially exterminated, or 
that they have not had time to recover their normal numbers. 
On the wing almost as few species appeared, and even Fidonia 
atomaria was but thinly represented. Hmmelesia albulata and 
Thera variata appeared, but in small numbers, as did also 
Pterophorus polydactyla, the latter looking very little the worse for 
its hybernation. Xylophasia ruwrea was represented by half a 
dozen specimens; and the small Geometre, such as Jodis 
lactearia, Panagra petraria, Heliothis marginata, and Eupithecia 
nanata, were few and far between. In fact mothing in the 
evening can only be said to have been a total failure, as twenty 
minutes sometimes elapsed without seeing a single specimen. 
The species taken of exceptional interest were Lobophora 
