THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 79 
Accordingly I procured a quart bottle with as wide a mouth as pos- 
sible—a fruit jar would have done very well—put in it enough lumps of 
common fused cyanide of potassium to cover the bottom, and having 
poured upon this about an inch of plaster of Paris mixed with plenty of 
water, I had only to await nightfall to commence operations. 
The large poison-bottle worked to a charm; scarcely a moth escaped 
which I desired to take. With the new instrument I became impatient of 
the time required to take out and pin each specimen as soon as stupefied, 
and tried the experiment of capturing every uninjured moth seen and 
allowing them to remain ina layer upon the plaster until it was convenient 
to return to the house and sort them over, taking a moderate amount of 
care that they should not be unnecessarily shaken up in carrying. 
Rather unexpectedly I found that this treatment did not seem to injure 
or rub the specimens in the least degree, though sometimes nearly a 
hundred moths of all sorts and sizes would be piled together, making a 
stratum an inch or two thick in the bottle. 
After this discovery night collecting became easy, nets and boxes were 
left at home, and the only necessary articles were a lantern and the poison- 
bottle. Arrived at a tree and carefully turning the light upon the sugared 
patch, I selected out such moths as seemed desirable, and, removing the 
stopper, gently touched them from below with the open bottle. When 
they had flown down into the receptacle, the cork was replaced and the 
specimens were thus safely disposed of till the following morning, when 
they could be sorted over at leisure. 
Occasionally a very wary moth would fly away at the first approach of 
artificial light, and I endeavored with laudanum and hydrate of chloral 
to so stupefy them that they could be readily taken. The laudanum was 
rather too effective, seeming to intoxicate them; at any rate, after imbibing 
the mixture, the moths fell off the tree and sprawled around in the grass 
in a very absurd manner, quite unable to fly away ; but still most of them 
managed to go a considerable distance, and so were lost in the grass. The 
hydrate of chloral had no effect whatever upon them ; some moths which 
took a considerable quantity of a very concentrated solution—about equal 
bulks of the salt and of water—remained unaffected. 
Sometimes ants were troublesome, biting the trunks of the moths as 
they fed, and causing them to fly away. In these cases a dose of laudanum 
was generally effective in driving off the ants for a considerable time. 
