46 THE entomologist's record. 



Entomological Souvenirs.' 



By J. W. TUTT, F.E.S. 



Twelve months ago, when our leading entomologists wrote the 

 series of interesting and informing articles published in the Century 

 nos. (Jan. and Feb.) of the Kntotn. Record, one was at once struck with 

 the distinct line of cleavage, showing, more or less, two distinct types 

 of mental training in the writers, that appeared not only in the line 

 taken by the writers, but also in their evident views as to the broad 

 bases on which, in their opinion, entomology should be studied. On 

 the one side was the satisfaction expressed at the facts amassed and 

 the work chronicled of our knowledge of things ; on the other was an 

 implied dissatisfaction that so many evidently capable thinkers and 

 observers largely wasted their best efforts by species- describing and 

 mere reference work, and did not, therefore, add anything at all, com- 

 mensurate with the time spent, to our knowledge of the vital 

 activities of the organic beings they studied, and hence brought us no 

 nearer to the problems bearing on the phenomena of life. 



Amongst those entomologists who have taken a foremost place 

 in drawing our attention to the functional activities of insects and 

 their variation under different external stimuli, is Mr. Merrifield, and 

 it is to him that we largely owe the translation of Fabre's earliest 

 work. He has long wished to bring the observations of our 

 illustrious neighbour under the immediate ken of British entomolo- 

 gists, recognising that if our collectors were once brought under the 

 influence of the methods of such a naturalist — if they once understood 

 that in the open fields real science was to be studied in more interest- 

 ing and complicated forms than is possible in the closet, museum, or 

 library, from the dried bodies of the victims we profess to love — a force 

 would be brought to bear on our favourite pursuit that would be 

 irresistible in the advance it would make, and would turn to real 

 scientific purposes much of the more or less useless collecting that 

 takes place, perhaps, nowhere so extensively as in this country, 

 although the disease seems very generally distributed in Central 

 Europe. 



Fabre, " that inimitable observer " as Darwin called him, obtained 

 his earliest inspiration from Leon Dufour, and his first published ento- 

 mological work, that gained the honours of the Institute of France, 

 was the complement of Dufour's marvellous account of the manner in 

 which Cercerif: btiprentica fed its progeny on Bitjtrestis hifamata. His 

 account of how he was led to become an entomological observer is 

 graphically told. He relates how, one winter evening, beside a 

 stove where the ashes were yet warm, while his family slept, he was 

 forgetting, while he read, all the cares of the morrow (as professor of 

 physics he was then earning the princely salary of £Qi per year), when 

 he chanced to light on the entomological pamphlet by Leon Dufour, 

 to which we have just referred. He says : "Certainly, long ere this, I 

 had felt a great interest in insects ; from childhood I had delighted in 

 beetles, bees, and butterflies ; so far back as I can recollect I see 

 myself enraptured by the splendours of a beetle's elytra or the wings 



* " Insect Life," by J. H. Fabre, D.Sc. Edited by F. Merrifield, F.E.S. , with 

 a preface by Dr. D. Sharp, F.E.S. Price, Gs. (Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1901.) 



