PROC. ENT. SOC. WASH., VOL. 24, NO. 7-8, OCT. -NOV., 1922 171 



and she urges Hiawatha to 



"Slay this merciless magician, 

 Save the people from the fever 

 That he breathes across the fen-lands 

 And avenge my father's murder!" 



Which injunction he proceeds to obey but in doing so encounters 

 various dangers, among which is: 



"All the air was white with moonlight, 

 All the water black with shadow, 

 All around him the Suggema 

 The mosquito, sang his war song." 



thus correlating the insect vector of malaria with the disease 

 itself, which seems almost prophetic in view of the fact that 

 Hiawatha was written in 1855 and this relation was not finally 

 established by Ross until 1897. 



The poetry of entomology has previously been mentioned 

 and to this category are referable all complete poems which 

 have for their principal themes insects or insect life. There are 

 many of these, some of them consisting of but a single verse 

 while others run into hundreds of lines. Most of the "standard" 

 poets have at one time or another apostrophized insects or sung 

 of them in relation to nature. Thus we find Spenser, Cowley, 

 Herrick, Parnell, Cowper, Gay, Montgomery, Clare, Keats, 

 Moore, Rogers, Wordsworth and many more, all represented, 

 while among the recent poets such verses are exceedingly numer- 

 ous, Madison Gawein, the Kentucky poet, alone having written 

 more than a dozen complete poems on various insects. Ento- 

 mological poems are of several forms, but perhaps the most com- 

 mon is the apostrophe, or address directed to the insect by the 

 poet, such as Wordsworth's and Rogers's "To a Butterfly," 

 John Clare's "Sonnet to the Glow-worm," Tennyson's "The 

 Grasshopper," and Emerson's "The Humble Bee." Another 

 favorite form of entomological poem is the fable in which the 

 insect holds converse with some other creature, as in Gay's 

 "Turkey and the Ant," Cowper's "Nightingale and the Glow- 

 worm," Wordsworth's "Star and the Glow-worm," and Caro- 

 line Leslie's " Meadow Talk. " Still another form. is the allegory, 

 such as "The Periwinkles and the Locusts," and "The Bullock 

 and the Fly" of Thomas Moore, Herrick's "Upon a Fly," and 

 Spenser's " Fate of a Butterfly. " The poetry of love, too, is not 

 without its entomological phases. Witness, for instance, 

 Thomas Moore's "What the Bee is to the Floweret," and 

 "When the First Summer Bee," and Herrick's "Captivated 

 Bee," all of which are love poems of the most fervent and 

 saccharine character. Less common but more interesting to the 

 entomologist, are the narratives in verse dealing with the natural 



