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 years in 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, AnopJieles 

 maculipennis. It appears, therefore, that future visitors should 

 take precautions against this pest. I suspect that malaria is 

 pretty universal throughout Eastern Eussia. 



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 Melananjia var. smvarovius, 

 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 coelestina, 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 



