THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. So 



Chinese botany. A good many of the plants in the Kew Gardens were 

 obtained tlirough these two men, especially Dr. Faber. Some years since, 

 Dr. Faber, who was also a missionary, went into the interior of China and 

 took his '(lants with him, and died there, and his collection is supposed to 

 have been lost. Dr. Barchet has a duplicate, in part, of the Faber collec- 

 tion, and I went through it, especially the Rosaceae, and examined the 

 wild cherry, apple, pear, Cratjegus, etc., which had been collected in the 

 hill country further inland than I had reached, with the hope of finding 

 some insects on the herbarium specimens, and also to get some knowledge 

 of these wild fruits. But of entomological workers there are none in 

 Shanghai. 



Foreign collectors have done a great deal of work in China, notably 

 a wealthy Englishman, the late Dr. John Henry Leech, who spent several 

 years collecting Lepidoptera in China, and was for a time the owner of 

 '• The Entomologist." Much of the results is included in his " Butterflies 

 from China, Japan, and Corea," a sumptuous 3-vol. work. I met, oddly 

 enough, in going from Shanghai southward, a brother of Mr. Leech, who, 

 however, has no special interest in entomology, but is an attache of the 

 British Legation in Rome, and was taking a vacation trip around the 

 world. 



\Vhile there has been a good deal of insect collecting in China, the 

 greater portion of the country is absolutely unexplored entomologically. 

 Very few foreigners have ever gone through the interior provinces, and 

 in some of these the inhabitants are savage and unfriendly. In the vicinity 

 of all the trading towns there has been some collecting, but the interior 

 region is practically unexplored by scientists — that is, by collectors of 

 plants or insects. Plants have been studied, and especially the horticul- 

 tural sorts, more than insects, and explorers were sent out by the Horti- 

 cultural Society of England early in the last century to secure new and 

 rare plants for the English Gardens, and especially the Kew Gardens. A 

 Mr. Fortune, already mentioned, was sent out in this way, and spent three 

 years in China, between 1842 and 1845, ^"^ sent home shiploads of 

 plants, including plums, peaches, mulberries, etc. His explorations were 

 very limited, although reading them they seemed to cover a good deal of 

 ground ; but when one comes to examine his itinerary. Fortune in his 

 three years saw but little more of the country than I did, although, of course, 

 much more minutely. His longest trip into the interior was practically a 

 duplicate of the one I have just described, and he made a few explorations 

 along the coast region as far north as Peking. 



