5562 Natural-Historij Collectors. 



a suburb of Rio, where there are excellent hotels, is sufficient to reach 

 the foot of Corcovardo, a well-known mountain, some 2,*200 feet high ; 

 its collecting ground consists of a broad walk at the side of the famous 

 aqueduct, three miles long, which runs for a considerable portion of its 

 extent through virgin forest. Coleoptera are captured here, as else- 

 where, by beating bushes, or when flying by means of an ordinary ring- 

 net, although several new species each day were the result of our 

 collecting here, but yet the locality was not so interesting as others, 

 inasmuch as, from its propinquity to the city, it has been more care- 

 fully examined, and the species taken better known : on every day 

 that we visited it we met collectors, principally blacks, employed by 

 dealers in Rio ; these blacks, without any superfluous clothing, carried 

 in one hand a ring gauze-net on a thin bamboo pole 20 or 30 feet 

 long, in the other a strip of some soft wood, stuck over with rude pins ; 

 this was all their apparatus : when they discovered any " bicho," 

 either Lepidopterous or Coleopterous, above the ordinary size, or 

 brilliant in colours, they gave chase, and if successful skewered their 

 capture to their slip of wood, or to the outside of their cap. Many of 

 such collectors we met, but not a single entomologist: Entomology, 

 as a Science, is hardly known ; with the one exception of Mr. Fry, 

 whose splendid collections are still spoken of by every one here who 

 knows what Entomology means, we have heard of no one who, either 

 himself or by others, is seeking in any degree to become acquainted 

 with the Fauna of the country. Notwithstanding, however, the num- 

 ber of collectors who are to be met with along the aqueduct, this locality 

 well deserves the careful attention of the entomologist; granted that 

 the larger species are known, and in European cabinets, there remain 

 countless minute species disregarded utterly by those whose only 

 object is to make up show-cases for the drawing-room, many of which 

 doubtless will prove altogether new to Science. 



Tijuca is a scattered hamlet, situated at a height of about 1000 feet, 

 on a spur of the Corcovardo range, facing the sea, at a distance often 

 or twelve miles from Rio : as an entomological locality it disappointed 

 us : the hills surrounding it are generally cleared of forest, and con- 

 verted into coffee plantations ; owing either to this cause, or possibly 

 to its contiguity to the sea, insects of all orders are scarce, or, in truth, 

 for the most part entirely absent. The labour of several days here 

 failed in securing as many species as could have been collected in the 

 same time in any district in England. There is, however, one locality, 

 within an hour's walk of Mr. Bennett's hotel at Tijuca, which is a 



