12 BULLEVIN BROOKLYN EN'TOM. SOC. VOL. VL May 1883.) 
Editors Department. 
UIn this department will be brought short notes from all sources, extracts from 
correspondence, hints, queries, criticisms and the like, and any facts of interest that our 
subscribers or correspondents may send to us will find a place here. Editors. ) 
Preserving Duplicates. One of the difficulties a collector of coleoptera bas 
to contend with when he makes large collections is to provide room for all his 
duplicates and still have them convenient and perfect when he wants them. 
Pinning them takes time, labor and pins; retaining them dry unset makes a 
breakage almost certain before the insects can be pinned and they require very 
careful handling : keeping them in alcohol mixes them up so much that they 
cannot be conveniently gotten atand when they are removed they harden rapidly. 
A modus open to none of these objections and which we have thoroughly 
tested and used for two years is to preserve them by soaking them for a week or 
more in a fluid prepared as follows : 
Dissolve 100 grammes alum, 25 g. common salt, 12 g. salpetre, 60 g. potash 
and 10 g. arsenious acid in 3000 g. boiling water. Filter the solution and when 
cooled addin the proportion of 10 litres of the fluid, 4 litres glycerine and one 
itre methyl-alcohol. At the end of that time the insects may be taken out and 
dried in the air: the fluid evaporates very slowly and it takes several days before 
it has all disappeared, but when it has evaporated your beetle remains soft and 
flexible for years, can be handled without danger of breakage and pinned when 
desired, sent unset all over the world and can be used when it reaches your 
correspondent either as a cabinet specimen or for dissection. 
Should the beetles loose in appearance, become dirty, or it be desired to 
harden them, a benzine bath will clean them and will remove all trace of the fluid 
and the beetle will become hardened. Our own collections of duplicates are all 
preserved in this way, the species being kept in small, tight pasteboard boxes, 
easily excluding Anthrenus, ready for reference at all time and compact ; many 
thousand specimens being kept in the same drawer. Je 1B) Se 
Book Notice, For the benefit of those who desire to know of all the new 
species published we would call attention toa paper on ‘‘The Moths of New Mexico” 
by A. R. Grote M. A., which recently appeared in a London periodical, the 
Annals & Magazine of Natural History (January 1883 pp. 49 —58). It contains a 
list of New Mexican species collected by Prof. Snow. Quite a number of new 
species are described and one new genus, Copimamestra based on the Huropean 
Mamestra brassicee and a new species, occidenta. Apropos of this genus we re- 
collect reading only a few days ago in Herrich-Schaeffer about as follows — “it 
would be just as unwarranted and nonsensical to create a new genus for brassice 
because forsooth it has a claw at the end of the tibia”. 
We would also call attention to the fact that so good an authority as Lederer 
did not consider brassice as distinct from Mamestra. The proof of course could 
not be read by the author and as a necessary result such errors as Sparagmia for 
Spraqueia occur. J. B.S. 
