28 INSECTS AND PLANTS AT PORTLAND. 



appear in quantities in certain spots; and on a good night when 

 the Echium and wild sage, which we found quite the most 

 attractive plants, were covered with moths sucking honey, 

 including many rare ones, especially some of the genus Agrotis, 

 the sight was one that an entomologist would not easily forget. 

 No less than 17 of this genus are included in my list, the 

 scarce A. pyrophila (simulans) being not uncommon in some 

 seasons on these two flowers. They also came more or less to 

 sugar, which we sometimes put on flower-heads, with the 

 exception of Agrotis lucernea, which disdained such coarse fare. 

 It and A. lunigera were fairly common. In the bramble 

 bushes on the West Cliff is found a rather scarce smallish 

 spotted grey moth, of an exceedingly wild and active nature, 

 Eupithecia constrictata, the wild thyme pug, which feeds on 

 thyme. You stand on a shaky stone with net erect, and lightly 

 beat the bramble bush with a stick. It rushes out, flying in all 

 directions alternately, and you aim at it and generally catch a 

 bramble and get a great hole in your net, if you do not over- 

 balance and fall headlong into the brambles, as I once saw a 

 friend do, much, I regret to say, to the delight of his youthful 

 son! Indeed the person who named it the " wild thyme " pug 

 was not mistaken, as it certainly does give one the "wildest 

 time " of any Portland moth in my experience. Perhaps the 

 most exciting form of collecting here is with a big lamp 

 (acetylene was not in common use, so I had a paraffin lamp 

 enclosed like a street lamp) in the autumn. On a good night, 

 numbers of moths, nearly all Noctuce and males, keep on flying 

 to it and flutter lip and down the glass, including Heliophobus 

 hispidus, one of the well-known Portland moths, which used to 

 be considered rare when people searched carefully for it by 

 day amongst the grass and stones, Epunda lichenea, a light 

 form, a beautiful form of Aporophyla australis and other species. 

 At ivy bloom also we used to get some, but light was by far 

 the most productive. The females of H. hispidus, &c., could 

 be found crawling up grass stems, but hardly ever came to 



