66 THE EEPOET OF THE No. 36 



to the waist through mazy labyrinths of swamp; that no sooner had I escaped this 

 involuntary dipping, than a thunderstorm came up and baptised me all over again, 

 a cold douche and a shower (so to speak) being thrown in gratis on the top of the 

 foot and hip baths already so lavishly provided; and again, that, early and late, 

 mosquitoes and deerfly swarm there in countless myriads. 



Damning evidence to you jurymen, perhaps; to me, proof positive of Mr. 

 Bumble's famous apothegm, '"' Tlie Law is a hass." One tithe the facts in the 

 other scale of the balance would serve to kick the beam. Witness the troop of 

 black squirrels I met, hotfoot at a game of tag; the little couple of fellow-entomo- 

 logists I surprised, pouncing on ground beetles in the carpet of dead leaves, as 

 pretty a pair of young skunks as you would wish to see anywhere; the bittern I 

 watched stalking frogs, with all the cunning and the zest of a human hunter; the 

 hen partridge that held me at bay to cover the retreat of her brood; the whip- 

 poor-wills, flitting in ghostly silence from their nesting place; the grosbeak, in his 

 leafy hermitage, all its belfries a-peal with melody; to say nothing of the flower- 

 clusters of chokecherry I found, sheltering in their midst the rare little Anaglyptus 

 I had vainly sought for eight years and now took nearly a score of; and the wind- 

 fall of beech trees I happened on last July — an illustration (come to think of it) 

 of the struggle for existence, no less striking, if less gruesome, than the fly-blown 

 carcase already, writhing with new life of an alien order — three giant beeches, 

 thrown in some titanic westling-bout with Boreas, their dying shafts alive with 

 Longhorns, Buprestids and other brooding insects; gangs of pigmy foresters, 

 drilling, boring, and charging, " throng " at their self-imposed task of wood-scaveng- 

 ing; strange medley of life in death, such as fed the melancholy of Shakespeare, 

 when he wandered, moralising, with Jacques through the Forest of Arden. 



These and a score of other scenes remain, tapestried in the rich brocade of 

 memory ; while all the tale of misadventures has long faded into nothingness. Every 

 trip I made last June and July brought me home at nightfall, footsore indeed, but 

 laden with treasure-trove, and eager for the monow's sun, to light up once more 

 that land of glamour, elf-haunted still and fraught with mystery, the Wood of 

 Desire. 



INSECTS AS MATERIAL FOR STUDIES IN HEREDITY. 



W. LOCHHEAD, MACDONALn COLLEGE. 



For some years I have given attention to problems of heredity, and have been 

 impressed with the importance of the place insects have taken in the solution of some 

 of the problems. I thought, therefore, that it might be of interest if I brought 

 together the many scattered references in current literature to the investigations 

 that have been made with insects. 



Towj:r's Experiments. 



No question in heredity has been more keenly discussed than " Are acquired 

 characters transmissible?" The neo-lamarckians assert that characters impressed 

 upon an organism by its environment may be and often are transmissible. 

 Weismannists, on the other hand, maintain that such characters are never trans- 

 mitted. Tower's investigations set forth in " An Investigation of Evolution in 

 Chrysomelid Beetles of the Genus Leptinotarsa " (Cam. Inst. Publ. No. 48) are 

 interesting in this connection. He subjected beetles, when their reproductive 



