234 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 Eussian 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. 



