pursued with fair success, though on a smaller scale; entomology, we fear, is like the hand-loom, almost forgotten. We should remember, also, that Alkrington Hall, near Middleton, was the residence of the celebrated Sir Ashton Lever, gentleman, scholar, and naturalist, and that it was by him that the innumerable objects of the famous Leverian Museum were brought together. While a resident at Alkrington Hall (the ancient family seat) he had the best aviary in the kingdom. In 1775 the museum was removed to London, and ten years afterwards it was sold by auction piecemeal. Sir Ashton's Manchester town house was that one in "Lever's Row," now called Piccadilly, which has for many years been the "White Bear" hotel. When he died, in 1788, this house was advertised as eligible for a ladies' school, being so far away from the centre of business, and fields within a few yards! "White Moss," as before-mentioned (p. 60), has long since been converted into farm-land, but in the days referred to was still in its glory, dull to look at, no doubt, but to the interrogator a local garden of Eden. Never shall we forget the genial smile that rippled old George Crozier's broad, round, rosy, white-fringed face as one sunny afternoon in Whitsun-week, 1839, we stepped with twenty or more under his guidance for the first time upon the elastic peat, and beheld the andromeda and the pink stars of the cranberry, these also for the first time. To Crozier the pretty flowers were familiar as the hills; his joy was to watch the delight they gave the juveniles. Presently a man came up and asked if we were "looking for _brids_." A little puzzled at first by the strange inquiry, the mystery was soon solved by his taking off his hat and showing it stuck full of butterflies, the "birds," or in his homely Anglo-Saxon, the "brids" caught during his ramble. Among the more remarkable insects then to be captured on White Moss were the showy beetle called _Carabus nitens_, the glittering green stripes of its wing-cases edged with a band of brilliant copper-colour; the fox-moth, _Lasiocampa rubi_, so called from its peculiar foxy colour; and the emperor-moth, _Saturnia pavonia_, for which the moss had been from time immemorial a noted locality. Great has been the sport of many an entomologist, as, sitting on White Moss on a fine day in early summer, with a captured virgin female of this beautiful creature, the _antennæ_ of which are like ostrich plumes, the males have flocked to him, or rather to _her_, by the hundred, for the virgin female of the emperor-moth, though she can fly, prefers to sit still until she has been visited by an individual of the other sex. Up to this period she exudes a delicate odour which attracts the latter from long distances, those which have far to come, and arrive late, or not till after the advent of the first, turning back, unless captured by the entomologist's net, as soon as they perceive by their wonderful instinct that she is virgin no longer.