160 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ILLINOIS 



SCRAPS PICKED UP BY THE WAY. 

 which he presented to us as follows: 



" It is amusing sometimes in moments of leisure, when alone and 

 not tormented with the persistent cares for the to-morrow, when travel- 

 ing over prairie and through lonesome woods for instance, no faster than 

 horseflesh can go. to muse, whence happiness or miseries come, and how 

 much we owe to littje things for both. I have thus once been musing 

 on the birth and early youth of Entomology. The wise man tells us 

 that there is 'nothing new imder the Sun,' and I have tried to apply the 

 saying to the subject before me. The horticulturist and the agriculturist 

 will study chiefly that part of the science which treats of the noxious 

 insects, and of the means to destroy them, or at least check their in- 

 crease; it is due to self-preservation, that we as lords of the creation, 

 stoop to apparently so little things, and in this sense 1 am prepared to 

 maintain that there is 'nothing new under the Sun ,' that Entomology is 

 no new science, that it is as old as written language at any rate ; what- 

 ever occurs or manifests itself for good or for evil in the existence; the 

 preservation or comfort of man, becomes necessarily the object of his 

 attention, and of study to the more intelligent, and it is chiefly to the 

 two former that we are indebted as the originating agents of the science. 

 Then, as now. man was bitten, stung, tickled, and crawled over, by day 

 and by night, yet would he not stoop down to the biters, the stingers, 

 and ticklers, and learn something of their inner lives; but when it mat- 

 ters about the very existence or preservation of life, when it matters 

 about the destruction or diminution of his bread, then those little de- 

 stroyers at once become important in proportion to their destructiveness; 

 and the intelligent man at once perceives the necessity of acquainting 

 himself with the habits of the enemy, in order to disiover the proper 

 means of warfare. This is the birth of Entomology;- its growth has ke])l 

 pace with the gradual increase of noxious insects, and of cultivated 

 plants. 



There are, besides, other elements Avhich might be regarded as com- 

 ponent stones in the arch of the science, one — namely superstition, — 

 which is almost an inherent part of the moral existence of the ancients, 

 the foundation of their religious systems, ihe soil in which rooted much 

 of their poetry and arts. 



It is the ])rovincc of science to dispel suj)erstition ; yet the latter 

 was before the former and superstition is (luasi the mother of science. 

 At any rate we have now some names which were suggested by supersti- 

 tion; for instance the si)ecific name Atropos given to a large European 

 Sphinx, Avhich bears on its breast the figure of a human skull. Airopos is 

 the great name of one of the three goddesses of fate, the one who cut 

 the thread. i'o this day is the moth regarded as a messenger of death 

 with the common peo])le of Europe, when flying into a lighted ro(jm, 

 perhaps a sick chamber. We need therefore not to go back to the an- 

 cients for instances of superstition in connection with our subject ; does 

 not the vocabulary of popular names itself to-day teem with such that 



