48 THE ENTOMOLOGIST 8 RECORD. 



pupa has been exposed for " years " to a low temperature and has 

 emerged at all. Our author, describing how newly emerged butterflies 

 try their wings before they essay their first flight, writes : — " They 

 vibrate their wings, sometimes with such rapidity that tliey are lost 

 in a kind of mist, and with such power^^that their bodies would be 

 carried suddenly into the air were they not firmly anchored by 

 three pairs of hooked claws." This is pro])ably very picturesque, 

 but what is the kind of mist, and what is the exact preven- 

 tive of a disappearance based on these Jack-in-the-Box propen- 

 sities ? To us the whole of this, and pages of similar matter, are 

 pure verbiage and unmitigated drivel. The descriptions of the butter- 

 flies, their larva3 and pupae, are skeletons obtained evidently, although 

 there are no quotation marks, from a few well-known sources. The 

 good old story of how to catch Purple Emperors with " a large net 

 mounted on the end of a pole twenty or thirty feet in length," and " the 

 difficulty of wielding such a cumbersome implement," is served up as if 

 quite new. The original writer of this canard knew nothing of the 

 subject he was writing about, and those who copy him appear to know 

 less, and to desire to know no more ; but for all that, we can assure Mr, 

 Furneaux, that far from " few falling a prey " to the use of a long- 

 handled net (not twenty or thirty feet), we know well three collectors 

 from Dartford and the neighbourhood (two of whom, happily, have long 

 since died), who used to take some thirty to forty A. iris a day between 

 them, until they practically exterminated the insect in its well-known 

 haunts in North Kent. The whole volume is a parody on entomology. 

 The errors it contains cannot but work the greatest possible harm to any 

 youngster into whose hands it may be put, and the somewhat gaudily- 

 coloured plates of the British butterflies and of some of the more showy 

 moths, are likely to produce an impression on kind-hearted but ignorant 

 people, that it would serve well as a gift-book to children. The fact, too, 

 that the publishers are scholastic publishers, increases the possibility of 

 the evil. To them we appeal most earnestly, for the sake of education, to 

 have the book thoroughly overhauled by a competent specialist, and 

 not to do untold injury to a generation of children by the dissemi- 

 nation of wholesale error. We earnestly entreat the author to read the 

 current entomological magazines and recent publications, and not to be- 

 lieve that anyone who has strolled about a museum or library can write 

 a book on the manifold wonders of Nature, which, indeed, can only be 

 learned by river and hedgeside, in wood or on moor, by him who has 

 had a life-long training, and has, besides, an intuitive love of natural 

 objects. 



We see from the preface that " The favourable reception with which 

 the * Out-door World ' has been greeted, has encouraged the publishers to 

 issue a series of volumes, dealing with the various branches of natural 

 history." Such a series, if written in the style of Butterflies and Moths, 

 will be, educationally, nothing short of a calamity. If, however, the 

 publishers put such a series into the hands of competent specialists, each 

 book into a master's hand, we shall welcome the advent of each volume. 

 Popular science is not necessarily a mixture of fiction and imagination ; 

 there are writers who can deal with facts, in a much more interesting 

 and literary manner, than the author of Butterflies and Moths treats of 

 fiction. 



