ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS 



PHILADELPHIA, PA., JUNE, 1922. 



Collect Data First, Specimens Second. 



When this number of the NEWS reaches its readers the col- 

 lecting season will already have been under way for some 

 weeks. Indeed some kind of entomological collecting is pos- 

 sible at almost all seasons of the year. It is, therefore, never 

 too late to remind collectors that in most cases the data which 

 they may obtain with their specimens (if they will) are more 

 important and more valuable than the animals (insects) them- 

 selves. To be sure, as an illustration of morphology or of a 

 taxonomic unit of some sort, a specimen, unaccompanied by 

 any data as to its habitat, its time of occurrence, its relations 

 to its surroundings, has a certain value, but from any other 

 viewpoint such a naked object is useless. All of the most in- 

 teresting sides of entomology, of biology, are based upon the 

 observations made in connection with the living thing and its 

 surroundings, and the more completely these are recorded in 

 connection with the specimens the better. 



Dr. A. G. Ruth ven, in his Report of the Director of The 

 Museum of Zoology of the University of Michigan, for the 

 year ending June 30, 1921. makes a strong and interesting 

 appeal for "Geography in Museums of Zoology," saying among 

 other things : 



Specimens accompanied by geographic data are more valuable for 

 taxonomic investigations than those without this information, . . such 

 data arc indispensable for geographic studies, ... it is an anachronous 

 practice to continue the piling up of records of a kind once thought to 

 be adequate but now known to be inadequate for the purposes which 

 they should serve. 



185 



