238 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 
to offer a feasible solution of my difficulties, and this was con- 
tained in the blessed word Sarepta. One finds it immediately 
the study of European butterflies is commenced enshrined in 
the classic pages of Kane, and described as the haunt of almost 
everything eastern; and Staudinger and every other authority 
confirm this view, and quote it on innumerable occasions. 
The great blessing of Sarepta from my point of view was the 
fact, known to me, that its population consisted chiefly of 
Germans; and surely one could obtain with them clean accom- 
modation and wholesome food, and, further, the risk of sickness 
to be apprehended elsewhere would be avoided, or very much 
lessened, in their town. 
About one hundred and fifty years ago that extraordinary 
woman the Empress Catharine the Second, who then ruled the 
fortunes of Russia, was desirous of colonising the country around 
the Volga, and her own people not being then sufficiently 
civilised to form suitable colonists, she induced great numbers 
of Germans to settle there, granting them great tracts of free 
land and freedom from military service, and conferring other 
important privileges upon them. At the present day there are 
dozens of these colonies, the inhabitants of which are still largely 
of German extraction, and Sarepta is the most southern of them. 
It is situated on the right bank of the Volga some three hundred 
miles from its mouth. 
I do not know who discovered Sarepta entomologically, but 
Edward Eversmann in his ‘Fauna Lepidopterologica Volgo- 
Uralensis,’ published in 1844, and still the standard work on the 
Lepidoptera of Kastern Russia, was well acquainted with it. In 
his preface he speaks of two brothers of the name of Kindermann 
spending the summers of 1838 and 1839 collecting Lepidoptera 
there. Healso mentions that an entomologist named Zwick had 
still earlier collected Coleoptera and Lepidoptera in the same 
place. Since the days of Kversmann the best known investigator 
has been a German resident, H. Christoph, who collected insects 
for Staudinger, and from whom most of the numerous specimens 
in our National Collection at South Kensington, which are 
labelled Sarepta, came. Christoph undertook several expeditions 
into the Caucasus and other parts of Asiatic Russia, and resided at 
Sarepta until about twenty-five years ago; his son still lives there; 
most of his specimens in the National Collection date back about 
fifty years from the present time. Another German resident of 
Sarepta, a botanist of the name of Becker, seems to have studied 
Lepidoptera as well as botany, and I am informed he made an 
extensive collection of the former, which is still in the district. 
The town seems from time to time to have been visited by 
entomologists from Germany, but I have been unable to find 
any results of their investigations in print, though there may be 
-some in the magazines of that country. 
