INSTRUCTIONS FOR COLLECTING INSECTS, 197 



than twenty years, and he has never lost a specimen during that 

 period from the ravages of other insects ; those, therefore, who wish 

 to accumulate a cabinet would do well to commence from the begin- 

 ning on a plan which will release them from all future care respecting 

 it; besides forming a most appropriate ornament either for study or 

 parlor. 



We have now reached the conclusion of a pleasing task, undertaken 

 in the hope that it might subserve the purpoire of leading many active, 

 intelligent, and inquiring minds to observe the little people of the 

 insect world, to share the delights, pleasures, and knowledge that 

 communication with Nature never fails to bestow, or to contend for 

 the honorable distinctions which always follow an earnest and per- 

 severing devotion to the study of natural history. As this paper is 

 intended chiefly for the use of the novice, we have sought simply to 

 show how that which is manipulative can be best performed, and to 

 record such experience as might benefit them on their entrance into 

 this new world. It is, I know, looked upon as insignificant, the 

 domain of plagues, pests, and human annoyances, by many, a great 

 many in our own country who should be better informed, but are, 

 perhaps, unobserving and unreflecting, and the attention and study 

 given to these beings considered a waste of the fleeting hours of life 

 which should be devoted to lofty and noble purposes. They forget, 

 or do not know, that the works of Nature are all alike intricately 

 planned, the result of thought and premeditation which binds the 

 most dissimilar departments into intimate and dependent relation- 

 ships, that no one can be studied without involving a knowledge of 

 the others, which meet us boldly and constantly face to face on every 

 pathway of knowledge. They forget that all branches of natural 

 science are but little rays of light emanating from the great source 

 of it all, lighting up and beautifying the human soul, which is en- 

 dowed with capacities to absorb it and assimilate it to itself; and 

 thus the occupation of the students of God's works, unlike that of the 

 patient alchemists of olden time, who sought to seize the occult mys- 

 teries, transmutation and immortality, becomes an effort to accumu- 

 late and illustrate those truths, which transmute disbelief into golden 

 thought and life-invigorating faith. Do not the lives of many votaries 

 of natural science verify the pretension ? The tearful life of the great 

 Swammerdam, the patient and accurate historian, the acute and tender 

 investigator of the lives and structure of the insect, who, had he 

 enriched the world with that emanation of his genius the microscope 

 alone, and left unwritten his great and immortal work, would have 

 been entitled to the gratitude of every lover of knowledge — to an 

 immortality of praise. Poor, and almost friendless, he became, per- 

 haps, the originator of the science of entomology ; and I can see him, 

 even now, choosing rather to follow heaven's own light than to 

 abandon it for the ease of an exacting parent's hearthstone, wander- 

 ing houseless and needy through the ancient streets of Amsterdam, 

 spurned from the doors that should have been opened to receive him, 

 and disinherited of a patrimony that to him would have been princely, 

 contemplating painfully the necessity of separating himself for gold 

 from the cherished objects of careful accumulation and study, his frame 



