TURNIP-FLY. 
95 
would not, I fancy, be of much use : but I one day was 
cogitating on tbe* matter, and argued to myself thus : it 
would be a difficult task to catch and kill twenty thousand 
fleas if shut up in a room with them ; but it might not be 
quite so difficult to prevent twenty thousand fleas coming 
into a room where there were none previously ; and the 
wisest way seemed to me to find out how they could come 
there. Now, as all straight -forward inquiries of this kind 
are laughed at, and at once yclept theories, I kept all my 
operations to myself, and now, for the first time, ofl'er them 
to the public. I am very sorry to say they are yet incom- 
plete, but still they will be found of some use to those who 
are disposed to pursue the subject. 
After I had made the acquaintance of these fellows so 
thoroughly that I knew them whenever I met them, 1 
amused myself by sweeping the hedge-rows with a gauze 
net fixed on an iron hoop, and this hoop screwed to the 
top of a stout walking-stick. These hedge-rows require a 
word or two : they are generally huge embankments 
thrown up like the fortifications of the ancient Britons, and 
on one side there is commonly a deep trench, making the 
simile still more complete : on the top are antiquated spe- 
cimens of hazel, oak, maple and whitethorn, occasionally 
chopped down to hedge measurement; and high above 
these a consumptive elm may here and there be seen rear- 
ing its naked and ugly stem. The sides or banks of these 
escaping unobserved, that the earlh became mouldy, and they were all de- 
stroyed ; but I have a great many specimens of the beetle produced from larvae 
which I fed and placed in a garden pot enclosed in a cage of fine wire gauze, 
but they being introduced at various times as they became full fed, I could 
not ascertain the precise time of any individual specimen. — Trans, of Ent. Soc. 
of London^ ii. 24. 
