ix 
Mr. T. Bainbrigge-Fletcher, the Indian Imperial Entomo- 
logist, read a paper on collecting in India at the 
Entomological Congress held at Pusa in February, 1919, 
and this has been issued as a Departmental Bulletin of the 
Indian Agricultural Research Institute; it can be bought for 
a few cents. Lt.-Col. W. H. Evans has also just published 
an excellent paper on the same subject in the Journal of the 
Bombay Natural History Society, which I hope will be 
reprinted and put on sale. ; 
The great enemies of collectors in Ceylon are mould and 
mites, and a liberal use of Naphthalene is the best protection. 
Should mould appear, a small wad of cotton wool damped 
with Formalin may be pinned in the box for 24 to 48 hours; 
this will kill the mould which can then be removed with 
a fine camel’s hair brush. 
Very little has so far been done in breeding our forms, 
and even the larva of Appias paulina, almost our com- 
monest butterfly, is still unknown. The most satisfactory 
method of breeding is to induce a female to lay eggs in 
captivity. This can be done by growing the food plant in 
a flowerpot in a cage of mosquito netting. Catch the 
female with as little injury as possible, and feed her regularly 
with jaggery, toddy, or rotten fruit. The resulting larvee 
can then be divided and reared under different conditions of 
light and shade, moisture of food, etc., in the hope of breeding 
wet and dry season, or other forms. The parent must be 
preserved for comparison, even though she is almost invari- 
ably badly battered. Unfortunately many butterflies refuse 
to lay eggs in captivity. 
A large collection when set up unfortunately requires a 
lot of boxes and takes up a lot of room, so many collectors 
only keep a very limited number of each species. From a 
scientific point of view it would be far better to collect one 
or two genera only and work them thoroughly. 
Butterflies can be studied anywhere in the Island, though 
only a few species could be expected in a district like Hatton 
where there is little jungle or waste land. Bandarawella 
