Furnished with a notebook and all the tools of the naturalist lens, net, and little boxes of sawdust steeped in anaesthetic for the capture of rare specimens they would wander "along the paths bordered with hawthorn and hyaebla, simple and childlike folk," probing the bushes, scratching up the sand, raising stones, running the net along hedge and meadow, with explosions of delight when they made some splendid capture or discovered some unrecorded marvel of the entomological world.