22 THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST, 



English collection, made up of specimens obtained from older collections 

 by a Mr. Burney, who was contemporary with — and corresponded with — 

 Havvorth and others, and many of whose msects fell into his hands." 

 Now, Haworih died about 1830 ; Barney died in 1S93, aged 79 years. 

 At the time of Haworth's death, therefore, Burney was a boy of 16, and 

 his correspondence (if any) with Haworth must have been of the most 

 casual character. Again, Haworth's insects were sold, and Burney would 

 have remembered had he bought it ; but boys of 16 do not, as a rule, 

 affect sale-rooms, and at this time Burney was a boy at school. It is on 

 Haworth's sale catalogue, Mr. SHngerland says, so Haworth did not give 

 it to Burney as a result of correspondence. Now we come to " the 

 specimen '' mentioned by Mr. Barrett. I also saw the specimen — one of 

 the American jaculifera. It had no label, no hint of its origin, and it 

 was present with dozens of other foreign specimens, with not the slightest 

 claim to be considered British. Two years ago Mr. Burney's collection 

 was sold. That collection was a marvel. It had been collected just as 

 some men collect " old pots" or '• toothpicks." Everything buyable had 

 been bouglu, and in England, as elsewhere, you can buy anything if 

 you will only pay enough. There were dozens — nay, hundreds of foreign 

 specimens that he had paid big prices for, and obtained with them a 

 British warranty ; many of the insects bore well-known lepidopterists' 

 names — some bore my own. So gross was the fraud, that I disowned 

 some of the latter in the sale-rooms. The whole collection was a scientific 

 lie from beginning to end, and among the foreign specimens sold— it was 

 not even labelled or suggested as British — was this American specimen 

 of jaailifera. What Mr. Dale surmises is quite beside the question ; 

 there are hundreds of people in England who can guess — more, perhaps, 

 in America — and when Mr. Dale ventures, without the slightest shred of 

 evidence, to suppose that it " probably came from Mr. Raddon," his wild 

 guess made of people who lived and died before he was born, helps to cut 

 away the ground from under Mr. Slingerland's feet, for even if every 

 assumption be made that this was a specimen introduced into Britain with 

 a fraudulent design in 1829 (the date of Stephens's Ilhtstrations), it could 

 not have been the specimen that Haworth described anterior to iSio; 

 and these are the facts on which Mr. SHngerland " believes that the weight 

 of evidence indicates that the subgothica of Haworth and Stephens were 

 the same species." I would only ask. Is this logic, or is it science ! if not 

 —what is it,? 



