116 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 



on a monument smiling at grief." Tiring of seeing moths 

 flying everywhere except into the trap, I commenced netting 

 them in the usual way, working towards my friends, who 

 were some two hundred yards away : at this distance we 

 could just see the trap-light, whilst the gas-lamps at Douglas, 

 two or three miles away, were bright objects. We returned 

 to the trap : the rain alone seemed to have found a way into 

 it, for it kept on fiz, fiz, fiz, fiz, down on to the light, 

 causing us to pass our jokes about its really being a 

 "fizzing" moth-trap, whatever might be said of its catching 

 capabilities. Towards midnight even poor Hopley gave it 

 up as a bad job. And now came the finale. I voted to leave 

 the heavy, useless thing where it was, to become a fossil ; my 

 friends voted we carried it home. 1 struggled with it as far 

 as I could carry it; my friend did the same : when about 

 half a mile from home Mr. Hopley took his spell, and 

 realized for the first time that the whole apparatus was 

 a worthless, heavy, troublesome thing. This may sound 

 shocking to those who have purchased these traps, but it is 

 not so bad as it appears at first sight; for if they will destroy 

 the inverted glass front, and have a flat front glass put in 

 rather over half-way up, and above this two or three strips of 

 glass about an inch and a half wide, overlapping like an 

 open Venetian blind, they will then have a practical moth- 

 trap, if not so portable as a proper one, which should be 

 capable of being packed in a paper parcel, twelve inches by- 

 ten, and two inches thick, and weigh under five pounds. If 

 the drawers are destroyed, and a little hay, grass or fern put 

 in, when set as I do, the approaches will be simplified, and 

 be infinitely superior as a trap. Moths lie still amongst 

 grass, &c., but 1 have no knowledge how they arrange them- 

 selves when they have sundry drawer spaces to choose from, 

 as in Hopley's ridiculous apparatus. — C. S. Gregson ; Fletcher 

 Grove, Edge Lane, Liverpool, May 12, 1870. 



Sound caused hy Halias prasinana. — On the 4th of June, 

 while collecting Lepidoptera in a wood, I was rather startled 

 about dusk by the sudden appearance of a couple of insects, 

 whirling frantically around each other, close above my head, 

 ♦and both uttering a shrill and peculiar sound at quick 

 intervals. It much resembled the sound made by small 

 birds which we sometimes see chasing each other. By a 



