Next morning I got a glass jar half filled with bruised laurel leaves, and Ma got it in, and after a day or two I set it, clumsily, and meant to take it to London, but had no small box to put it in.  I told Mr. Rothschild about it, and he said it sounded like a Castnia—­curious South American moths very near to butterflies.  So he got out the drawer with them, but mine was not there; then he got another drawer half-empty, and there it was—­only a coloured drawing, but exactly like.  It had been described, but neither the Museum nor Mr. Rothschild had got it!  I had had the orchids nearly a year and a half, so it must have been, in the chrysalis all that time and longer, which Mr. Rothschild said was the case with the Castnias.  On going home I searched, and found the brown chrysalis-case it had come out of among the roots of the same orchid the little Longicornes had dropped from.  It is, I am pretty sure, a Brazilian species, and I have written to ask Mr. Hall if he knows where it came from.  I have sent the moth and chrysalis to Prof.  Poulton (I had promised it to him at the lecture) for the Oxford collection, and he is greatly pleased with it; and especially with its history—­one quite small bit of an orchid, after more than a year in a greenhouse, producing a rare or new beetle and an equally rare moth!...

I am glad to say I feel really better than any time the last ten years.—­A.R.W.

* * * * *

The Rev. O. Pickard-Cambridge has kindly written his reminiscence of another very curious coincidence connected with a natural history object.

“Some years ago, on looking over some insect drawers in my collection, Mr. A.R.  Wallace exclaimed, ‘Why, there is my old Sarawak spider!’ ‘Well! that is curious,’ I replied, ’because that spider has caused me much trouble and thought as to who might have caught it, and where; I had only lately decided to describe and figure it, even though I could give the name of neither locality nor finder, being, as it seemed to me, of a genus and species not as yet recorded; also I had, as you see, provisionally conferred your name upon it, although I had not the remotest idea that it had anything else to do with you.’  ‘Well,’ said Mr. Wallace, ’if it is my old spider it ought to have my own private ticket on the pin underneath.’  ‘It has a ticket,’ I replied, ’but it is unintelligible to me; the spider came to me among some other items by purchase at the sale of Mr. Wilson Saunders’ collections.’  ’If it is mine,’ said Wallace (examining it), ’the ticket should be so-and-so.  And it is!  I caught this spider at Sarawak, and specially noted its remarkable form.  I remember it as if it were yesterday, and now I find it here, and you about to publish it as a new genus and species to which, in total ignorance of whence it came or who caught it, you have given my name!’ Thus it stands, and ’Friula Wallacii, Camb. (family Gasteracanthidae), taken by Alfred Russel Wallace at Sarawak,’ is the (unique as I believe) type specimen, in my collection.”—­O.P.C.