of every kind of rural beauty, and here and there gemmed with cowslips. Different paths take us either past the river again, and so by way of Ashley to Bowdon, or into the road that leads to the Downs. The latter is the shortest, but the Ashley way is the pleasanter. The distance in the whole is a trifle over that by the road, or, omitting fractions, four miles. All the way along the birds are in full trill; with this great charm in the sound, that independently of the music, the songs of birds are always songs of pleasure. We sing in many moods, and for many purposes, but the birds only when they are happy. No notes of birds have an undertone of sadness in them. Beautiful, too, in the early summer, is it to mark here the glow of the red horizontal sunlight, as it lies softly amid the branches of the golden–budded oak, and the milk–white blossoms of the tall wild cherries. Oh! how thoughtless is it of people to let themselves be scared away from Botany by its evil but undeserved reputation for “hard names,” when, with a tenth of the effort given to the study of chess or whist, they might master everything needful, and enter intelligently into this sweet and sacred Temple of Nature.

The interest of the Bollin valley is quite as great to the entomologist as to the botanist. By the kindness of my friend, Mr. Edleston, I am enabled here to add the following list of the Lepidoptera, which will be read with pleasure by every one acquainted with the exquisite forms and patrician dresses of English butterflies.

“The meadows,” he tells me, “near the river Bollin, from Bank Hall to Castle Mill, produce more diurnal Lepidoptera than any other locality in the Manchester district, as the following select list (1858) will suffice to prove”:—