PREFACE. .3 



doing for some other one who is humbly striving, that which at a time long 

 passed, was done for you. I have passed away from my subject entirely, but 

 it seems as if it were but a few days since I was taken by the hand and led 

 wondering, almost trembling into the presence of the grand old masters of 

 natural science, those titans who laid the mighty ground work for all futurity 

 to build upon. Lengths of crape were festooned across the Library, centred 

 in the beak of a great condor, a tribute to the learning and worth of Dr. 

 Morton, who had then just passed from his studies here to those in a land 

 where alone perfect knowledge is attained ; and further back peering out of 

 the gloom, hideous in its frightful ugliness, was the head of Gorilla Caniceps, 

 looming up like some Afrit or Gnome, the offspring of opium eating orien- 

 talism, and all around and above were books, books. How I wished I could 

 but spend my whole existence there, and I recollect staggering under the 

 weight of an old volume, heavier almost than myself, to where Dr. Zantzinger 

 was sitting, and asking him where the name of the huge moth there depicted 

 could be found, and how I stared when he told me that in those days they 

 had not yet named them, and how I wondered why Adam had omitted naming 

 such a vast number of beautiful things, or perhaps his records and catalogues 

 were lost in the deluge, (this latter was the most satisfactory conclusion I 

 could at that time arrive at.) And when new wonders revealed themselves 

 at every page, how I wanted some one to talk to about them and to share my 

 great happiness with me, but as I looked around I could see that all present 

 were either reading or writing, perchance some one as he glanced up from his 

 volume for a moment, met my enthusiastic gaze, and gave the little sickly- 

 looking boy a kindly smile ere he again resumed his book. Oh, those were 

 golden days ! How I treasured up the first poor battered specimen of the 

 European Peacock Butterfly, (Vanessa Io.,) for which I paid 25 cents to a 

 venerable taxidermist, who thought he might as well take my half-year's 

 savings for it as to throw it away ; how I wondered if by any earthly possi- 

 bility I should ever get another, in case accident by fire or flood should hap- 

 pen to this one. Then the first sphinx I ever captured (Lineata I think was 

 the species,) I kept him in a little box with a glass front, thinking that he 

 would die before long, in which opinion he didn't appear in the least to agree 

 with me, as his eyes shone like coals of fire night after night, and thinking 

 it would overcome the little difference of opinion, I at last run a pin through 

 his body and impaled him on a board with the innocent idea that it would 

 kill him, and the stupid thing wouldn't die after all, and my conscience 

 smote me day by day, for a week nearly, as he persisted in refusing to give 

 up the ghost ; and at last my father, who couldn't bear to see the thing suffer 

 any longer, unpinned it and despite the tears and appeals of his first-born, 

 threw it into the great old-fashioned wood stove to get it out of its misery, 

 as he said. This fixed that stove indelibly in my memory, it was a monstrous 

 old thing, that either threw out a fearful heat or none whatever, no medium, 

 if you let it burn, you had tolerably fair conceptions of Gehenna, if you 

 lowered the fire, lo ! it would sullenly die away ; " Darling & Smith, Joanna 

 Furnace," was the inscription borne by this household Moloch. Circumstan- 

 ces have many years later brought me to my present home, not many miles 

 from " Joanna Furnace." Since then on many an occasion I have met the 

 " Darling & Smith," and their children and their children's children, but it 

 needs none of these to remind me of the ruin of my first great entomological 

 capture, the recollection of which " only in death will die." 



But I can almost imagine P hear my reader's pshaw of impatience at my 



