934 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 
official calls out the name on each passport of the whole train- 
load of waiting people, and if you do not recognize your name 
when it is called out, and someone else claims your precious 
document, it disappears, and there you are! 
Immediately you have taken a room in a hotel, the proprietor 
demands your passport, for which he does not give a receipt. It 
is handed over to the police by him, and you get it back before you 
leave the town. At your last place of stay it pays an additional 
visit to the police to have stamped upon it permission to leave 
the country ; and on your return journey it is taken from you 
several hours before you get to the frontier, and only returned 
at the last Russian station. 
No, travelling in Russia is not likely to be popular with 
foreigners so long as the present passport regulations exist ; the 
Russians themselves recognize this, and there is an agitation 
going on at the moment to get them done away with. 
My thoughts had often been centred on Russian Lepidoptera, 
but I had fancied that it was rather too tough a problem to be 
tackled during a summer holiday. 
There are certain parts in the west and north-west which 
it is quite easy to reach, but the butterflies found there are 
generally too western in type to be novel, and one can get nearly 
everything with equal facility, and under much more favourable 
conditions of sojourn, in eastern Germany, or in Scandinavia. 
The interesting parts of the country from a lepidopterist’s 
point of view are unquestionably those which are the most 
remote from England; and these are by no means easy to 
reach, where time is an object, and when one gets there, at the 
end of about a week of travel, there are various reasons, as will 
be seen hereafter, which make the average family man think 
hard before he finally decides to collect Lepidoptera in remoter 
Russia. 
One can get very little reliable information in England 
respecting Russia. The ubiquitous Cook knows it not, and 
railway tickets from» London are only issued to Moscow, 
St. Petersburg, and Odessa. Bradshaw, in the Continental 
edition, professes to give time-tables of all the trains in every 
part. One wonders whence they were obtained, and if such 
trains really ever did run, for all I tested turned out to be 
hopelessly inaccurate, and there is no reason to suppose they 
were in any way exceptional. 
Baedeker, until this year, had only a somewhat ancient 
edition, in French or German, but within recent months a new 
one, in English for the first time, was issued. I was not aware 
of this edition until I called upon the British Consul-General at 
Odessa. This gentleman gave me this very useful piece of 
information, and further very kindly lent me a copy, which was 
of immense assistance. 
