July, '09] ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS. 303 



Packing Butterflies and Moths for Shipment. 

 BY WM. J. GERHARD, Chicago, 111. 



Although nearly every person interested in entomology oc- 

 casionally finds it necessary to prepare insects for shipment, 

 nevertheless a considerable lack of appreciation of the protec- 

 tion the material requires is still quite frequently apparent. 

 Even when only a limited number of specimens must be con- 

 veyed for some distance, a certain amount of care in preparing 

 them for this purpose is very essential. Much more import- 

 ant, however, do the requirements for packing insects become, 

 when an entire collection must be moved from one section of 

 the country to another. 



This phase of entomological technique has not been ignored 

 in previous volumes of the NEWS. It will, therefore, not be 

 an innovation, and may prove of some interest, to give a brief 

 account of the method used, when packing and shipping the 

 large and valuable collection of butterflies and moths, made by 

 the late Dr. Herman Strecker of Reading, Pa., and recently 

 acquired by the Field Museum of Natural History of Chi- 

 cago. The customary way of protecting insects against injury 

 while being transported having proved quite satisfactory on 

 former occasions, practically no departure was made from the 

 usual manner of preparing them for shipment. The following 

 account, therefore, merely illustrates the safety with which an 

 extensive collection of butterflies and moths can be moved from 

 one city to another. 



A large amount of work of a preparatory nature was, of 

 course, necessary before any of the material could be packed. 

 The first step in the desired direction was to number the cabi- 

 nets and all of the drawers, so that the original order of their 

 arrangement could easily be maintained. But much more es- 

 sential was it to preserve the original arrangement of the 

 specimens in the drawers. Hence even if the size of the col- 

 lection would not have made it an almost impossible task, it 

 would not have been well to disturb the specimens by transfer- 

 ring them into cotton lined drawers, or to arrange them shing- 

 le-like, as is frequently done with small lots of similar insects. 



