THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST 331 



them the fundamental principles? In a magazins of few pages 

 there is no room for repetition of the rudiments. We ourselves 

 cannot comprehend how any one can be willing to stick a pin 

 through an insect without possessing a short shelf of books to 

 tell what it is, why it is, how its life is passed, what are its relation- 

 ships. The writer recalls perfectly his own first entomological 

 experiences. A little girl in frail health had been taught by an 

 older brother to collect and try to study. To help her the writer 

 took the net and pursued butterfly and dragonfly. The first 

 evening came the first earnest perusal of the first book. It was 

 Comstock's Manual. It gave the order and the family, and had 

 wood-cuts illustrating typical forms. At each chapter there was a 

 delightful essay by Anna Botsford Comstock in general terms 

 that a child could understand. Long before there had come to 

 hand books by a Brooklyn artist who used to love his daily walk 

 behind the Flatbush waterworks, where the watershed was so 

 protected that Nature found her free sway. Wm. Hamilton 

 Gibson wrote most of his papers for Harper's Magazine, but all 

 were subsequently reprinted in quarto book form with the hundreds 

 of illustrations from thumb-nail sketch to full page plate. Most 

 of these are probably out of print years ago, but every copy found 

 in second-hand bookshop should be bought and treasured. The 

 late Henry G. McCook many years ago wrote a duodecimo called 

 "The Tenants of an Abandoned Farm." The wood-cuts were 

 rough but they had their charm, telling of spiders, ants, and a 

 host of others. A few years ago a new edition appeared, with some 

 changes and a difterent title. . All these preach the sermon of the 

 infinite beauty of the great All Out Doors. 



Every stranger who in the last two years has wandered into a 

 meeting of the New York or the Brooklyn Entomological Society 

 has been influenced thither by some book. Chief among them 

 have been the volumes of the late J. H. Fabre, a Frenchman, 

 now almost all translated into English. This wonderful man, 

 overlooked by the world almost to the hour of his death in extreme 

 old age, found and studied the infinities of animate creation in 

 his own back yard. In a forty foot square countless creatures 

 are born, married and died (just like humans). How much more- 

 did this impoverished Apostle of Nature accomplish than some 



