WAYSIDE NOTES. 
105 
The Mason College luis lost one of its professors, and the Bir¬ 
mingham Natural History and Philosophical Societies an active 
working member, by the sudden removal of Dr. John B. Haycraft, the 
College Physiologist, to temporary duties as “professor-substitute” 
during the ill health of Dr. Rutherford, at Edinburgh, to be followed 
by a permanent appointment on the University staff. Abundance of 
good wishes for his future will go with him from his friends in the 
Midland Metropolis. We see that one of the Birmingham daily papers 
describes Professor Haycraft as having undertaken the duties of 
“ Professor of Theology.” Almost simultaneously with this delightful 
suggestion (worthy of Mark Twain’s “English as she is taught”), we 
receive the card of a local supplier of gardener’s materials in which, in 
praising the virtues of cocoa-nut fibre refuse, he ascribes to it “ con¬ 
siderable antisceptic properties.” We strongly urge upon Professor 
Haycraft the advisability of giving this substance a fair and free trial 
in his new avocation. We do not know whether one and the same 
Mrs. Malaprop was responsible for both of the above slips. In justice 
it ought to have been so, for there is a fine dual association of 
“antisceptic” and “theology” on the one hand, and “antiseptic” 
and “ physiology ” on the other. 
In the Zoologist for January last some remarks were made, in 
an editorial, upon the “Horse-shoe Bats.” Mr. J. E. Kelsall, in this 
month’s issue, supplements this by some details as to the recorded 
distribution of the smaller species, Rlimolophiis hipposideros , in Britain, 
from which we extract the following references to the Midland 
Counties:—Worcestershire. Dr. Hastings, in his “Illustrations of 
the Natural History of Worcestershire” (1834), includes (p. 62) “ The 
large Horse-shoe,” R. ferro-equinum, but not the lesser species.— 
Gloucestershire and Warwickshire were added by Mr. Tomes in the 
second edition of Bell’s “British Quadrupeds” (1874), though it 
cannot be considered common in the latter county, since Mr. Tomes 
mentions only two localities for it—Welford and Ilagley near Alcester. 
In the former county it is stated to be not rare at Cirencester.— 
Staffordshire. The lesser Horse-shoe Bat is not mentioned by Garner 
in his “Natural History of the County of Stafford,” but Mr. J. R. 
Masefield, in a paper on “The existing Indigenous Mammalia of 
North Staffordshire,” includes it as occurring near Burton, on the 
authority of Mr. Edwin Brown. It is remarkable that these counties 
appear to form the south-eastern limit of this Bat in England, for, 
although numerous other species have been met with, this one has 
never been recorded to the south-east of these counties. In Hereford¬ 
shire it has been taken over the kitchens at Sufton Court, as recorded 
by Mr. R. M. Lingwood (Ann. and Mag. Nat. Hist., 1840, p. 185). 
From Derbyshire we have the evidence of Sir Oswald Mosley, in his 
“ Natural History of Tutbury,” that he received many specimens from 
“the calcareous caverns of Dovedale and Matlock,” and believed it to 
be dispersed over the whole of the limestone districts of the county. 
In Nottinghamshire, Mr. Whitacre has not met with it, but Mr. J. 
Ray Hardy, of the Manchester Museum, informs me that he picked 
up a dead one from the ground at Edwinstowe, in Sherwood Forest, 
years ago, “ too far gone to make a good specimen.” In sending me 
two Irish specimens he observed that if these are rightly named (as 
they certainly are), the Nottinghamshire specimen was identical with 
them. 
Caterpillars Incog.— The geometric moths have brown cater¬ 
pillars, which generally stand erect when at rest on the branches of 
