THE CANADIAX ENTOMOLOGIST. 243 



That Natural History takes firmer hold in a community of bo)'S than 

 anywhere else, was amply borne out at my new home of Trinity College School. 

 For years its Head Master had been Dr. Bethune, an entomologist of contmental 

 reputation. Though athletics held a high place of esteem, there was always an 

 awkward squad of a minority poor at games and forming a kind of Stalkey & Co. 

 in the school. Such boys have often a natural trend in the direction of birds' 

 nesting; and there had always been a good deal of surreptitious egg-collecting 

 done by the pupils; this was "taboo" among the masters, and in order to make 

 the ban effective, some wise-head of earlier days had instituted an annual prize 

 for wild flowers ; a rule of the competition was that each collection of plants 

 must be the work of two boys in partnership. This incentive of a prize largely 

 explains why there were usually at least four or five pairs of partners working 

 quite enthusiastically through the summer term at their collecting, mounting, 

 and naming of specimens. Almost as soon as I joined the staff my room became 

 the resort of the plant collectors, and when they organized into a Field Club, they 

 asked me to be their Honorary President. 



My first two seasons were spent in active pursuit of Botany and Ornithol- 

 ogy. I had cleared the way, I thought, enough to run both hobbies concurrently. 

 It was now that I began to fill two shelves with books on Natural History, one 

 devoted to plants and the other to birds, the nucleus of a whole case now num- 

 bering some 400 volumes. I never felt quite the same need of books, for pur- 

 poses of identification, in Botany as in Birds. When I came to the school first 

 I had nothing on Ornithology but a copy of Mclllwraith ; besides that, I knew of a 

 periodic publication called "Birds", afterwards "Birds and All Nature". But 

 almost coincident with my settling in Port Hope there began to appear a number of 

 popular books, with colored illustrations, on various branches of Natural History. 

 The pictures were nearly all photographic by the three-colour process. My first 

 purchase was Chapman's Bird Life and this was followed by the volumes of Neltje 

 Blanchan on "Bird Neighbors" and "Birds that Hunt and are Hunted", Dug- 

 more's "Bird Homes", Chester Reed's "Color Key to North American Birds" 

 :md "Key to the North American Birds' Eggs ;" more recently still were added the 

 invaluable little pocket books of bird pictures, description and classification ; be- 

 sides these I purchased (on a hint from one of John Burroughs' essays) a pair 

 of field glasses, and always carried ^notebook and pencil to the woods with me ; 

 lii this way I formed the habit of complex observations, attempting to jot down 

 the syllables of a bird's song or to describe it in words, to watch its coloring 

 in different parts, wings, tail, body, head, throat and breast, its perch and 

 manner of flight, and generally its habits; my first volumes on Birds were too 

 large to carry to the woods, but on returning to my study I always made a bee 

 line for the book shelf. At first my trips were primarily botanical and only in- 

 cluded bird notes on the side. But I made a number of most interesting obser- 

 vations, and in my almost daily excursions saw a great many out of the way birds 

 and bird homes. I never took an egg, even the rarest, and never (I am happy to 

 add) had the slightest desire to. 



While busy with bird observations, I found it a great pleasure to note 

 the birds seen in the winter and the early spring arrivals till the flights of warblers. 

 Among the birds that I saw occasionally all winter were robins : these appeared 



