of the Orange Tip butterfly, which is practically colourless, and the cabbage whites, and it would be worse than a crime to destroy so joyous and welcome a creature, whose advent is one of the pleasantest signs that summer is nigh at hand.  I have watched these fairy sprites dancing along the hedge sides at Aldington year by year, and in May they were extraordinarily abundant here, happily coursing round and round my meadow, and chasing each other in the sunshine.  The Orange Tip is quite innocent of designs upon the homely cabbage, the food-plant of the caterpillar being Cardamine pratensis (the cuckoo flower), which Shakespeare speaks of so prettily in the lines: 

     “When daisies pied and violets blue,
     And lady-smocks all silver-white.”

Possibly Hood was thinking of the Orange Tip when he wrote the lines that seem so well suited to them: 

     “These be the pretty genii of the flowers
     Daintily fed with honey and pure dew.”

A story is told of an undergraduate who united the hind wings of a butterfly to the body and fore wings of one of a different species, and, thinking to puzzle Professor Westwood, then the entomological authority at Oxford, asked if the Professor could tell him “what kind of a bug” it was.  “Yes,” was the immediate reply—­“a humbug!”

One of my schoolfellows, a boy about eleven, at Rottingdean school, and quite a novice at butterfly collecting, met a professional “naturalist” on the Warren at Folkestone, who inquired what he had taken.  “Only a few whites,” said the boy.  The man looked at them and, eventually, they negotiated an exchange, the boy accepting three or four others for an equal number of the whites.  On reaching home he found that he had parted with specimens of the rare Bath White, Pieris daplidice, for some quite common butterflies.  The Bath White is not recognized as a British species, Newman supposing the specimens taken in this country to have been blown over or migrated from the northern coast of France, as they have been rarely met with away from the shores of Kent and Sussex.

It is surprising to find so many people who seem unable to exercise their powers of observation to the extent of noticing the butterflies they daily pass in the garden, or along the roads.  One would expect that the marvellous colouring of even our common butterflies would arrest attention, and that interest in the names and life-history would follow.

In June in the Forest the rather alarming stag-beetle is to be seen on the wing on a warm evening; though really harmless, its size and habit of buzzing round frightens people who are not acquainted with its ways.  They are called locally, “pinch-bucks,” as their horns resemble the antlers of a buck, and they can nip quite hard by pressing them together.  I once saw a fight between a stag-beetle and a toad, it had evidently been proceeding for some time as both combatants were exhausted, but neither had gained any special advantage.