IU JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. XVII. 



The next requisite is a killing bottle. This can be obtained from any 

 chemist, and is ordinarily made from cyanide of potassium, covered over to 

 give a hard and dry surface with plaster of Paris. 



These bottles will sometimes " sweat " in the monsoon, and, when this occurs, 

 it is safest to get a new bottle at once, as a drop of the moisture on the wings of 

 a dying insect will completely spoil it. 



A good bottle should kill a butterfly or, at any rate, render it insensible in a 

 minute, and if it takes much longer, it is time to renew the poison both from 

 considerations of humanity, and because the less they flutter about in the bottle 

 the less likely they are to injure themselves as specimens. 



The insects become rather stiff when dead (though they are less so after 

 twenty-four hours than after a longer or shorter period). Except during the 

 monsoon, however, when they will always remain soft and pliant, it is best 

 always to put the contents of the killing bottle into a relaxing tin for 12 hours 

 before setting them. They should not be left much more than 12 hours in 

 this climate or they will rot. 



A relaxing tin is very simply made. An old cigarette tin will do with a 

 thick pad of folded blotting paper at the bottom thoroughly soaked in water. 

 The specimens only require to be laid on the top of it. 



The next operation is setting, and for this purpose the collector must 

 provide himself with a large store of the ordinary pin of commerce, a 

 stock of two or three sizes of entomological pins, some thin strips of paper, 

 and some setting boards. Before he can make or purchase his setting boards 

 he must decide whether he is going to set his specimens in the " English " or 

 ''continental" fashion. I had better explain these terms. The following 

 figure (Fig. 1) gives a sectional view of an " English " setting board : — 



Fig. 1. 

 The shaded portion is cork, glued on to a thin strip of deal. A is the groove 

 into which the body of the insect is pinned. The result of setting an insect 

 on a board of this shape is that it will stand very low on the pin ; that is, when 

 placed in the cabinet, it will be practically touching the cork and, in con- 

 sequence, be more accessible to mites, grease or mould, or any other enemy that 

 occasionally invades the cabinet, and further that there will be a great length 

 of ugly pin above it, so that an " English '' collection often looks as much a 

 collection of pins as of anything else. Of course, you can have the boards 

 specially made with a double thickness of cork, but even then the wings, having 

 been bent in a curve to suit the rounded shape of the board, always have an 

 untidy drooping appearance and look as though they had been taken off the 

 setting board before they were dry. There is another drawback to English 



