€^^ AND ^^l-^ 



JOURNAL OF VARIATION. 



No. 1. Vol. VI. January 15th, 1895. 



By G. M. A. HEWETT, M.A. 



It is with some reluctance that I write the title of this article, if I 

 may use so dignified a name : not because I have any doubts about my 

 own interest in the subject, but because I know very well that there are 

 so many men knocking about in the world, who not only rear a hundred 

 larvfe to my one, but who also study them through everything, from 

 an eye-glass to a microscope, whereas I confine myself to the naked 

 eye. Moreover, I don't keep a note-book. I am a little superstitious 

 about note-books. I have several times bought one. I am perpetually 

 coming across nearly new ones in odd corners of my house. But as 

 surely as ever I begin one, or even try to continue an old one, soraethino- 

 goes wrong with the larvae whose histories I am recording. At least I 

 am driven to conclude that this is the case, because I cannot find any 

 record of having kept any larvjB beyond the third moult. Of course 

 it is just possible that, having got the infants to an age of compara- 

 tive security, ^\^th measles and whooping-cough safely weathered, I 

 have ceased to think their doings worth recording. But I prefer the 

 view that an unkind fate sends an obscure malady to all larvje, whose 

 domestic lives I try to set down in a note-book. It is a poetical way 

 of looking at it, and also it saves me a great deal of worrj' and trouble. 

 " The diarrlicfia takes them all at random, 

 If of their lives you make a memorandum." 



It will doubtless be urged upon me that this is a very casual and half- 

 hearted way of studying natural history. I can only reply, with 

 apologies to Mr. So-and-So and Mr. Somebody Else, that it is better 

 than not keeping them at all. There are various classes of collectors 

 as has been pointed out already in the Record, in sharper laufuao-e 

 tlian I can command: (1) tliose who don't keep larvfe because it is too 

 mucli bother ; (2) those who don't keep them because they lack time and 

 room ; (3) those who keep them merely as machines for producing perfect 

 specimens; (4:) tliose who keep them from interest, more or less intelli<'-ent- 

 (5) those who keep them witli deep scientific ends in view, not carino- 

 much, comparatively speaking, for the specimens of insects which 

 result from them. It is a very good thing to know well one of these 

 latter gentlemen, as they are often willing to give away the pupse 



