6 



THE YOUNG NATURALIST. 



The excursion just spoken of, and which I am about briefly to describe, 

 was to that part of Cambridgeshire bordering on Suffolk, and was in fact 



A Day in the Cambridgeshire Woodlands. 



The popular idea of Cambridgeshire is, no doubt, that it is entirely a flat, 

 marshy country. This is certainly true of a large part of it — that known as 

 the fen district — but on the south. and east we have a range of chalk hills of 

 very moderate elevation truly, yet forming a district of quite a different 

 character to the fen land. A part of this chalk district in which trees are 

 not wanting is popularly known by Cambridgeshire people as the Woodlands, 

 and it was to this part I drove over from Cambridge one day in the early 

 part of last January. It was by no means a winter's day of the old fashioned 

 sort. No dazzling white deluge of snow covered deep the verdant plain. On 

 the contrary the meadows were as green as on a fine Spring day. The Red- 

 breast was about and many of his kindred, but he did not shake 



" From many a twig the pendant drops of ice 

 That tinkled on the withered leaves below" 



as he flitted light from spray to spray, for the simple reason that there was 

 none to shake. It will be in the remembrance of my readers what a mild 

 Winter that of 1883-4 was, and the weather I experienced on this day's 

 outing was a sample of it. I did not by any means confine myself to ento- 

 mology. I am a naturalist of the " general" sort, and not only butterflies, 

 moths, and coleoptera, but also birds, shells, rare plants, uncommon mosses 

 or lichens and fossils — not to mention divers other Natural History objects — 

 all have an attraction for me. I found or observed many other things besides 

 insects worthy of recording, but I shall confine myself, with but one 

 exception entirely to them, and this exception is the birds : I cannot forbear 

 mention of them. No mistake they were plentiful — so plentiful that 1 feared 

 it boded ill for my hopes of obtaining many coleoptera — and when I remember 

 my ill luck on that day I feel greatly inclined to coincide with Mr. Mosley 

 in the wish that they were not " protected" to such an extent as to make 

 them a nuisance. 



For alas ! I was unlucky in my collecting, I am bound to confess it, and 

 I can give a longer list of the lepidopterous pupse and coleoptera I ought to 

 have found than I can of the species I actually did find, and for this I blame 

 our feathered friends aforesaid, and — although I am great lover of birds-— yet 

 as I pulled the moss off beech tree after beech tree in search of the pupse of 

 of Eurymene dololraria, with the result that all my labour was thrown away, 

 and as I vainly sought on the oak trees for both that species and Odontopera 

 bidentata, and turned over stones and logs with the result of unearthing only 



