240 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 
shady gardens; but the whole is hardly what one expected from 
a German population; it was Germany of the eighteenth century, 
modified and not improved by the sojourn of its inhabitants for 
one hundred and fifty yearsin Russia. The streets are unpaved, 
except for one or two short lengths of cobbles, so rough that 
when we drove over them we wished they too had not been 
paved; undrained, and unscavenged, full of hollows, in which 
the water stands in great pools after every storm; and the sandy 
surface everywhere churns up into seas of mud almost knee 
deep during wet weather. 
One of the first things I noticed at Sarepta was that the 
window openings, outside the glass, had wire gauze shutters to 
exclude insect pests ; I inquired if there was any malaria in the 
town ; the reply I got was somewhat evasive, and later on I was 
told that it was not so bad as in the surrounding country. We 
were both provided with mosquito curtains, which we slept 
under, and avoided as much as possible going near swamps ; 
probably in consequence of these precautions we did not suffer 
any inconvenience ; but mosquitoes were not infrequent in our 
rooms, and one captured on my curtain has been identified at 
the British Museum as the malaria-conveying species, Anopheles 
maculipennis. It appears, therefore, that future visitors should 
take precautions against this pest. I suspect that malaria is 
pretty universal throughout Eastern Russia. 
The flora of the steppe did not come up to the expectations 
I had formed of it. I had looked to find a sward of brilliant 
flowers, but the growth is almost entirely Artemesia, grey and 
fragrant, of several species, and low growing, some six inches 
high; oxen and horses seem fond of it, camels devour it greedily, 
and the entire steppe smells of it. 
In places on the slopes of the hills there is a good deal of 
a fine dry wiry grass, the food of Melanargia var. suwarovius, 
and here and there one comes across a certain number of 
flowering plants; a brilliant purple sage is one of them, a bright 
pink Helichrysum another, there is a blue Linum, and several 
species of Phlomis, but the whole are not in sufficient numbers 
to produce any broad effect. 
The railway passes along the base of the hills, and upon its 
banks we found excellent collecting ground; there was here a 
luxuriant growth of many species of leguminous and other 
plants, and amongst them could be found such desirable butter- 
flies as Colias erate, Glaucopsyche colestina, Scolitantides pylaon, 
Zegris eupheme, and many others. 
The glory of Sarepta is, however, the ‘“‘ Tschapurnik Wald,” 
a large wood, the property of the community, and used by it for 
picnics and other kinds of recreation; it occupies a hollow in 
the hills some four miles to the south-west of the town. This 
wood and the adjacent bushy slopes have glades which are 
