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Vol. LIII. GUELPH, SEPTEMBER, 1921. No. 9 



POPULAR AND PRACTICAL ENTOMOLOGY. 



.The Life History of a Hobby Horse. 



by francis j. a. morris, 



Peterborough, Ont. 



Part HI. — Second Childhood — The Tree's Incline. 

 I suppose one reason why people do not transplant well in middle life is 

 that they never cease to miss the common sights and sounds of their native land ; 

 snatched away from daily contact with the environment in which they have 

 grown and spread until they come to fill every nook and cranny of it, they sud- 

 denly find themselves wrenched from a thousand rootlets that ministered unseen 

 to their life needs ; starved of their sap from root to stem, they lose their lusty 

 vigour, languish along their branches, and pine away in leaf and flower and 

 fruit. It is impossible to feel at home anywhere until you have become thor- 

 oughly familiar with your surroundings ; this power of adaptation, shared by 

 us with all things living, is strictly limited, and if the change is too violent or the 

 organism too far set in maturity, acclimatization becomes impossible. 



Not the faintest idea had I when I came to Canada -it twenty-five year^ 

 of age that my comfort and happiness depended mainly on familiarity with a 

 whole little world of natural objects, to which I had grown so used as to be quite 

 unconscious of their presence. The web that at infinite pains and with pro- 

 longed c^fifort I had woven for myself, at whose centre I swung cradled in con- 

 tent was suddenly swept away by the rough hand of circumstance ; I was flung 

 bodily to an infinite distance, to find myself sprawling hopelessly on the gmunl ; 

 instinctively I set all my spinnerets franctically to work rebuilding the orb without 

 which life itself was impossible, and gi'oping feverishly for fresh points of 

 attachment. 



All the years I had lived in Great Britain, I had never approached Nature 

 by way of Science ; though roughly familiar with the broader distinctions of 

 family, 1 knew next to nothing of genus and species, and had never studied the 

 classification of either Flowers, Insects, or Birds ; my knowledge was purely 

 empirical, and for the most part I was quite unconscious of the points of distinc- 

 tion in form and structure that must surely underlie our recognition of individual 

 forms. I was therefore powerless to identify what I saw, unless by good luck 

 it happened to have a next of kin among my acquaintance in Great Britain ; 

 with every stranger I met along tne roadside, I must turn (so like your stifif 

 Englishman!^ to my companions for an introduction, and then hunt him up in 

 Burke's Peerage or some other book of celebrities ; and I found to my sorrow 

 on enquiry that such popular guides and illustrations of the Ontario flora and 

 fauna were unprocurable. In little old Ergland. which you could set afloat in 

 Lake Superior, for a century or better, authorities more numerous almost than 

 the entire population of Canada had been publishing descriptions as accurate as 

 those of Scotland Yard, portraits as lifelike as Madame Tussaud's, that must 

 infalliblv lead to the apprehension of every flower, fern, insect and bird in the 



