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 Eastern Russia, was well acquainted with it. In 

 his preface he speaks of two brothers of the name of Kiudermann 

 spending the summers of 1838 and 1839 collecting Lepidoptera 

 there. He also mentions that an entomologist named Zwick had 

 still earlier collected Coleoptera and Lepidoptera in the same 

 place. Since the days of Eversmann 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 countrv. 



