SUGGESTIONS FOR DECOYING BUTTERt^LIES. 155 



male G. rhamni rapidly passed me on the wing, A few yards 

 further on it suddenly arrested its straight flight and began to 

 wheel round an object lying in the dust, which, on my coming 

 up, I found to be a crumpled-up ball of rose-coloured paper : my 

 arrival frightened the butterfly, and it continued its headlong 

 career, but scarcely had I left the spot, when, doubling on its 

 track, it rushed back and repeated the circling round the paper, 

 descending repeatedly to within about an inch of it, but without 

 actually settling. This time I watched its proceedings from a 

 convenient distance without disturbing it. After a few minutes' 

 bird's-eye view, the insect seemed to have made up its mind that 

 there are such things in the world as rose-coloured balls, without 

 the perfume and nectar of the rose ; so away it went, and so did 

 I. But imagine my astonishment to see it fly steadily a few 

 hundred yards ahead, and then suddenly return to the ball, over 

 which it performed similar aerial evolutions, till a band of noisy 

 excursionists made the place too hot for it to stay . . . ." 

 (E. M. M., June, 1873). 



The next note was extracted, by my dear friend the late E. 

 C Eye, from the second part of the first volume, page 223, of 

 ' Timehri,' the journal of the Eoyal Agricultural and Commercial 

 Society of British Guiana, in which occurs an account of a visit 

 to Mount Eussell by the editor, Mr. E. F. Thurn, who thus 

 describes the native method of decoying butterflies : — " The 

 Indians of the place, seeing our interest in catching butterflies, 

 exhibited various clever ways of entrapping these insects. To 

 catch those of a yellow hue they picked and laid on the ground 

 the flowers of a yellow Bignonia {B. chika), and this proved a 

 most successful plan. Equally successful were they when they 

 laid decaying Banana skins on the ground to attract the large 

 blue Morphos ; but an attempt to attract certain red species by 

 displaying the ripe red fruit of the ' faroah ' plant {Bixa orellana) 

 was not successful. These methods of enticing insects were com- 

 pleted by inverting a round ' quake ' (a wide mouthed basket of 

 open wicker work) over the bait, taking care to raise the quake 

 so that the lower edge was some inches from the ground. The 

 butterflies attracted by the flowers made their way under the 

 raised edge of the quake, and when the Indians approached flew, 

 not out under the edge of the quake, but upwards into the top, 

 and were thus captured" (E. M. M., June, 1883). 



In the twentieth Eeport of the Entomological Society of 

 Ontario, 1889, Mr. Denton, of Wellesley, Massachusetts, gives an 

 account of his method of decoying butterflies; he says that, having 

 caught a specimen of Papilio turnus (a butterfly far from common 

 in his locality), he was surprised to see, while he held his capture 

 between his forefinger and thumb, another of the species dart 

 down and hover over it for a moment, as if to entice it away. 

 He then placed the almost lifeless butterfly on a bush, partially 



