TUTT AS I KNEW HIM. 119' 



nothing with the question until I had learned all that Linne said and 

 meant about it, and all that Borkhausen said, and Haworth, and 

 Lederer, and in fact every lepidopterist who ever put pen bo paper. 

 And what Mr. Tutt preached, he conscientiously practised. I was 

 brought, a little later, into very close contact with him and his methods 

 in the bibliographical side of the preparation of his Heterocera volumes 

 of The Britiah Lepidoptera : nothing could exceed the solicitude with 

 which he would seek, and the zeal with which he would assimilate,, 

 absolutely every scrap of information on each point as it engaged his 

 attention. 



I believe I am right in saying that this thoroughness was some- 

 times manifested almost in spite of himself. Critics told him that Britiah 

 Lepidoptera contained too much detail, some said there were too many 

 recorded localities, some too many dates, some too much synonymy or 

 too much bibliography, and so on. He did not deny the force of the 

 criticisms so much as his own power to act upon them. I am still 

 preserving, and sometimes smile over, a very characteristic letter written 

 not long before the commencement of his matpuini opus, in which — 

 referring to the bete noire of nomenclature — he calls down anathemas 

 on the man who does any more " wholesale resurrecting," One wonders 

 what he would have said had he been confronted with this letter when 

 he was in the thick of Fnmea casta, Talaeporia tubidosa, Narycia 

 vionilifera, and the rest of them ; probably he would have owned — 

 what in his behalf we write as an encomium — that he found he coidd 

 not be otherwise than " wholesale." 



No-one has written or spoken of Mr. Tutt without marvelling at the 

 extent of his activities, and I do not propose to enlarge upon his almost 

 phenomenal success in making big "bags" in the field, or upon his volu- 

 minous contributions to almost every description of entomological liter- 

 ature, or upon his educational work outside the province of entomology. 

 But I desire before closing to mention one other phase of the subject, 

 which was perhaps the standing marvel to me, and yet is less likely to 

 have received so much attention from other contributors. I refer to 

 his intense interest and temporary absorption in not only the great 

 concerns of his own work, but in all manner of passing questions, 

 such as those of the administration of the Societies, the idosyncrasies 

 of a particular entomologist, or the like. Not once only, but re- 

 peatedly, I have met him at the Natural History Museum, confessing 

 he has more work before him than he can possibly get through, yet 

 devoting a quarter of an hour or more to an eloquent tirade on some 

 such topic as these. It is, perhaps, not ungracious to own that — being 

 somewhat of a plodder, and having probably too few general interests 

 — I have sometimes chafed under these interruptions ; but on looking 

 back I can see that they, too, are a part of the man, and that he could 

 scarcely have been what he was apart from this intensity of convic- 

 tion, and wideness of interest, and, in fine, exemplification of the 

 scriptural maxim, "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with 

 thy might."— 62, Graham Eoad, Dalston, N.E. April 10th, 1911. 



