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Vol. LI. LONDON, APRIL, 1919. No. 4 



POPULAR AND PRACTICAL ENTOMOLOGY. 

 Remarks on Collembola. 

 by charles macnamara, arnprior, ontario. 



That ingenuous character, the Man in the Street, commonly holds the 

 erroneous opinion that an entomologist is a person who knows all about insects. 

 Consequently, on the rare occasions when he brings some Entomological Depart- 

 ment a "bug" to be named, if his specimen happens to be anything a little less 

 common than a cicada or a Luna moth, he sustains a distinct shock when he 

 finds that even the professional entomologist cannot tell him offhand exactly 

 what it is, and must refer it to a specialist for determination. Our friend's 

 surprise is, of course, due to the fact that he does not realize the vast, over- 

 whelming abundance and variety of insect life; and he is not aware that no 

 investigator, however studious, can even in the course of a whole life-time 

 become acquainted with more than a small proportion of the prodigious number 

 of different creatures included in the class Hexapoda. 



And, besides the sole weight of numbers forcing the student of insects to 

 specialize if he wishes to make any real progress, other influences also work in 

 the same direction. The moths and butterflies, for instance, attract such a 

 host of collectors as much by their beauty as by their biological interest, that 

 there are probably more students of Lepidoptera than of all the other orders 

 put together. Beetles, too, make a fine showing in a cabinet, and Coleopterists 

 are legion. Then again, we are forced to give earnest if unwilling attention to 

 those pestilent and all too numerous insects that devour our crops, bite our 

 bodies, inoculate us with disease, or otherwise interfere with our living. All 

 this tends to focus entomological study on certain handsome or obnoxious 

 orders and categories, while other less showy or more inoffensive insects are 

 passed over. 



One of these neglected orders is the Collembola, familarly known as 

 Springtails. These insects are so minute that, preserved in alcohol in tiny 

 vials or mounted on microscope slides, they make no display in a collector's 

 cabinet. And they are practically without economic importance. Some slight 

 injuries to garden and greenhouse have been alleged against them, but their 

 very worst depredations bear about the same relation to the virulent activities 

 of say the locusts or the mosquitoes, as a small boy with a peashooter does to a 

 German army corps invading Belgium. Consequently, they have been little 

 studied. 



Unassuming and harmless as they are, however, they have always attracted 

 some attention. Owing to their wide distribution and, at times, extraordinary 

 abundance, they drew some notice even from the earliest naturalists. I do not 

 know that they are mentioned in the classic though unreliable pages of the 

 Elder Pliny, but Linnaeus did not overlook them, and with his passion for classi- 

 fication, duly tabulated them in his great "Systema Natura?" under the generic 

 name of Podura. 



