NOTES ON COLLECTING. 205 
the g; in the other, where the flight was very short, I am inclined to 
think this was impossible, but the case was altogether exceptional, the 
? having wings so deformed and weak that I greatly doubt whether 
she could even have carried her own weight. The extreme shortness 
of the flight may either have been due to a futile effort on the part of 
the ?, or to an unusual attempt on the part of the g, but there was 
no time to come to a definite decision, and one can only judge by 
‘circumstantial evidence.” —G. WHEELER. 
PARARGE MEGAERA IN SuRREY.—In view of the discussion on the 
disappearance of the Satyrids, it may be interesting to state that 1 saw 
three specimens of Pararge megaera in a garden at Guildford on June 
7th, within a few minutes of each other, during a very brief spell of 
bright sunshine.—G. WHEELER. 
WOTES ON COLLECTING, Etc. 
Oita popripa.—l remember well how dear old Tutt was wont to 
erowl each time he rediscovered that taking one or two specimens of a 
butterfly that interested him did not signify that, with a little patience 
he would secure a goodly number of them ; I never could quite persuade 
him that one swallow is not necessarily the precursor of many in this 
country. Of course there are certain butterflies and moths which at a 
given season abound in a given spot, but this I have always found to 
be rather the exception than the rule in Switzerland. In spite of many 
summer holidays spent in this part of Europe, Tutt never got over the 
feeling that if he only took two or three of a required species, it was 
because he had not found the spot in which, according to his theory, it 
certainly abounded. Of course I knew that he was wrong, because in 
many cases, when we were out together I knew the whole country 
round. I have never wielded the green bag in England since I was a 
small boy, but, if I rightly understand what Tutt used to protest, you 
there generally catch few species and many specimens. A rather 
obvious explanation of this difference seems to me to be that, as there 
are in Hngland far fewer species, the struggle for existence is pro- 
portionally less marked, or rather, it is confined to a fight between the 
insect and its natural enemy, whereas in Hurope the contest is between 
many rival species and their natural enemies. The one is a war 
between Servia and Austria, the other a universal conflagration, and 
one, too, in which the allied races turn and rend one another after 
fighting the common foe—like so many Balkan States. The natural 
result of this contest is that our hill sides and valleys are scattered 
with a motley host of victors who have won throuch in the fight to 
perfect inseethood, and who, having declared a truce, are now dancing 
over their former battle-fields. 
Seventy-two hours of lessons a week means very little time for 
entomology, especially when one has to turn out a certain number of 
translations, legal and political, in the hours that are not wanted in 
sleep and feeding the machine. I have had no opportunity of flourish- 
ing the green bag this year, but as I have sat of an evening at my 
window with a concert of nightingales going on in the lime trees just 
in front of me, I have often noticed, when I raised my nose from the 
exercise books I was correcting, or the morrow’s dry-as-dust lesson of 
mathematics I was preparing, that the moths that flew in and out and 
