THE ENTOMOLOGIST’S WEEKLY INTELLIGENCER. 
101 
I had before found that confinement 
in a pill-box was not always so strong 
an inducement to Noctuee to commence 
laying, as it seemed to be to Geomelrre 
and Bombyces, so I determined to give 
them larger space, and confined the 
female moths siugly, or, in the case of 
species of which it was difficult to dis- 
tinguish the , sexes without injuring the 
living insects, I placed three or four 
moths together in wooden or card-board 
boxes, five or six inches in diameter and 
two or three inches deep, substituting 
gauze for the covers. These boxes I 
placed out of doors in a sheltered place, 
and after waiting some days, or in two 
or three cases as long as four or five 
weeks, I was generally rewarded by 
seeing the gauze cover and the sides of 
the box gradually becoming dotted with 
eggs. 
Of course the ladies who were thus 
imprisoned during the most interesting 
period of their lives could not be ex- 
pected to live through it without some 
nourishment, and in supplying this I 
found at first a little difficulty. Though 
I had seen starving moths suck up drops 
of water as greedily as a drinker cater- 
pillar that has been kept dry for a day or 
two, I thought houey would be a more 
invigorating diet for them ; but honey, 
when smeared on twigs or the sides of 
their box, is apt to injure them by clog- 
ging their legs and wings as well as the 
under sides of their abdomens; I there- 
fore cut up an old sponge into small bits, 
and when I have any moths imprisoned 
I slightly damp one of these bits with 
water, then saturate it, but not to over- 
flowing, with liquid honey, and fix it 
with a pin to the side of the box, and 
from this the moths can extract their 
food without danger of soiling them- 
selves. When wooden boxes are used 
they should be lined with paper for greater 
convenience in detaching the eggs from it. 
The only one of the Deltoides or 
Pyralides that I have taken in hand is 
Hypena crassalis ; out of a number of 
females some were kept in pill-boxes and 
some placed out of doors in a glass 
cylinder, and accommodated with sprigs 
of whortle-berry stuck in water, and these 
last laid more than ten times as many 
eggs as the others. 
Q. 
KAY SOCIETY’S PUBLICATIONS. 
The Ray Society is about to issue to its 
600 subscribers an important entomo- 
logical work, viz., * A Monograph of 
British Spiders,’ by James Blackwall, 
F.L.S. 
We give here some extracts from the 
preface and introduction to Mr. Black- 
wall’s volume, which we trust will have 
a tendency to increase the number of 
entomologists who devote themselves to 
the Arachnida. 
“ Since the publication of Dr. Lister’s 
treatise, in 1678, little attention has been 
bestowed upon the natural history of 
spiders in this country till within the last 
thirty years ; and we are indebted to 
almost every advance which has been 
made in it, during that long interval of 
time, to the talent and industry of the 
continental zoologists, particularly those 
of France, Sweden and Germany. 
“ Under these circumstances it is 
hoped that the present imperfect endea- 
vour to supply that desideratum in the 
Zoology of Great Britain, a history of our 
indigenous spiders, adapted to the exist- 
ing state of arachnological science, will 
be regarded with due consideration for 
