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an opportunity of judging if extreme cold would have had 

 any marked effect on insect life ; to my mind it tends to 

 protect rather than destroy, no amount of continuous frost 

 kills them. A broken season, on the contrary, with mild 

 intervals, followed by wet and cold nights, doubtless is far 

 more destructive. The experience of the past year tends to 

 prove this fact. Lepidoptera were generally fully up to their 

 normal numbers, many species unusually abundant ; and our 

 brothers of the net, all over the United Kingdom, reported 

 favourably of the season until the miserably wet and cold 

 July and August. Even during this time, in some localities, 

 notably in the Fen district, our collectors were having a 

 grand time of it. A great cause of failure was the non- 

 attractiveness of sugar. It is a peculiar feature that at some 

 period of a season this bait utterly fails to attract, it is not that 

 moths are not plentiful ; you may see them dash by in headlong 

 flight, but they heed not the sweet feast spread for them. I 

 am disposed to think that we rely too much on our sugar 

 patches ; should these fail, many return from their outing 

 empty-handed, when, if they had searched carefully on the 

 herbage, grass and flowers with a light, a good haul might 

 have awaited them. My rarest and best captures have resulted 

 from search, rather than sugar. That imagines were generally 

 plentiful is, I think, proved by the fact that in the autumn we 

 were invaded by an extraordinary number of larvae ; they 

 were in evidence everywhere, not only common species, but 

 also many usually considered rarities as well. 



The only novelty to our lists of Macro-lepidoptera was a 

 single specimen of Prodenia littoralis, which was bred by 

 Mr. Boden from a larva found feeding on tomato. Naturally 

 this has no pretension to being British ; but it is interesting 

 as indicating a possible addition to our list now that this 

 fruit is so largely imported to this country. Just as many 

 additions to our fauna have arisen by imported seeds,fruit, etc. 



A supposed new Tortrix was announced from Ireland by 

 Mr. Carpenter, as Tortrix donelana ; but this is generally 

 believed to be, by our best authorities, merely a local form of 

 T. viburnana. 



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