have finished the last tree of your round, and rapidly retracing
your steps to the first you will perhaps see a small moth, with wings
raised, rapidly flitting up and down your patch of sugar. This is most
probably the "Buff Arches," usually first to come; in fact, during the
summer months, it is perhaps as well to get the sugar on at eight
o'clock, as I have known this species, the "Peach Blossom" and the
"Crimson Underwings" (Catocala promissa and sponsa), to come on the
sugar in bright light while yet the last rays of the sun were lighting
the westward side of the tree-trunk, when all the rest lay in shadow.

Fig. 52--Impaler.

If you are not facile princeps at "bottling," do not attempt it with
the three or four species named above, but strike them with the net
o at nce, for they are the most skittish of noctuae, especially in
the early part of the evening. Striking down such insects with a
parchment-covered battledore, which Dr. Guard Knaggs considers inflicts
the least injury, or impaling them with a triangle of needles stuck in
cork, in the manner shown in Fig. 52, or even with a single darning
needle, has been recommended, but after a trial I have come to the
conclusion that such plans are clumsy in the extreme.

A little practice will enable the beginner to dispense even with the
net, which tends to "rub" such dashing or unquiet insects, and to
rapidly cover them with a large cyanide bottle, or, failing this, with
the instrument shown in Fig. 53, which is a combination of the "drum"
and cyanide bottle, and will be found very useful for skittish
insects. A, represents a cyanide bottle with no neck--a wine or
ginger-beer bottle cut down, by filing it around, and then tapping it
smartly, does very well on an emergency.

Fig. 53--Diaphragm bottle.

On this is fixed a tin cylinder, B, having a slot cut in at D, in
which a diaphragm, C, works, and is prevented from falling out by a
stud fixed to its inside, and from falling inside by the stud above C.
To use this, the bottom must be stopped with a cork, through which a
piece of stout wire is bolted, the wire to come up to, but just
underneath, the slot D, allowing the diaphragm to close. In action
this machine is worked thus: Supposing an insect is seen resting on a
flat surface, such as palings, a wall, or the trunk of a tree, you
having previously removed the cork and pulled the diaphragm out of the
slot to its full extent, take aim, as it were, at the insect