PREFACE 
some time or other in the life of every healthy young per- 
n son there appears to be developed what has been styled 
“the collecting mania.’" Whether this tendency is due to the 
natural acquisitiveness of the human race, to an innate apprecia¬ 
tion of the beautiful and the curious, or to the development of an 
instinct such as is possessed by the bower-bird, the magpie, and 
the crow, which have the curious habit of gathering together and 
storing away trifles which are bright and attractive to the eye, I 
leave to students of the mind to decide. The fact is patent that 
there is no village without its youthful enthusiast whose collection 
of postage-stamps is dear to his heart, and no town in which 
there are not amateur geologists, archaeologists, botanists, and 
zoologists, who are eagerly bent upon the formation of collections 
of such objects as possess an attraction for them. 
One of the commonest pursuits of boyhood is the formation 
of a collection of insects. The career of almost every naturalist 
of renown has been marked in its early stages by a propensity 
to collect these lower, yet most interesting and instructive, forms 
of animal life. Among the insects, because of their beauty, 
butterflies have always held a foremost place in the regard of 
the amateur collector. For the lack, however, of suitable in¬ 
struction in the art of preserving specimens, and, above all, by 
reason of the almost entire lack of a convenient and well-illus* 
trated manual, enabling the collector to identify, name, and 
properly classify the collections which he is making, much of 
the labor expended in this direction in the United States and 
Canada fails to accomplish more than the furnishing of tem¬ 
porary recreation. It is otherwise in Europe. Manuals, compre¬ 
hensive in scope, and richly adorned with illustrations of the 
