Sugaring for Moths 



collecting jars are full. We have taken more than a hundred 

 specimens representing thirty species. Not a bad night's work. 

 Hurry up! Here are the draw-bars. Are you through? Put 

 out the light in your lantern. Come quickly after me. I know 

 the path. Here is the back garden gate. It is beginning to 

 rain. We shall have to run if we wish to avoid a wetting. 

 Ah! here are the steps of the veranda. Come up! 



My! what a flash and a crash that was! Look back and 

 see how the big trees are bowing their heads as the wind 

 reaches them, and the lightning silhouettes them against the 

 gray veil of the rain. We may be glad we are out of the 

 storm, with a good roof overhead. To-morrow morning the 

 sun will rise bright and clear, and we shall have work 

 enough to fill all the morning hours in setting the captures we 

 have made. Good-night! 



"It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many 

 plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects 

 flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to 

 reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each 

 other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all 

 been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest 

 sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance, which is almost 

 implied by reproduction ; Variability, from the indirect and direct action 

 of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so 

 high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural 

 Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less 

 improved forms. Thus, from the war of Nature, from famine and death, 

 the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the 

 production of the higher animals, directly follows: There is a grandeur 

 in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally 

 breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one, and that, whilst 

 this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from 

 so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful 

 have been and are being evolved." Darwin. 



I50 



