April, '11] murtfeldt: insect collections 229 



WHY COLLECT INSECTS? 



By Mary E. Murtfeldt, Kirkwood, Mo. 



One reason. With all the excellent and profusely illustrated Man- 

 uals of Entomology, with Doctor Holland's exquisite Butterfly 

 and Moth Books and Doctor Howard's inclusive Insect Book and in- 

 numerable monographs, bulletins and reports on injurious and beneficial 

 insects, it seems scarcely worth while for the amateur entomologist or 

 the teacher, to be at the trouble and expense of making a collection 

 of specimens. But for some reason the most accurate and attractively 

 colored pictures fail of making an impression on the youthful mind, 

 at least. They are so satiated with depictive art in newspapers and 

 magazines, so much of which is caricature or exaggeration, that they 

 have become sceptical as to the honesty of any representation which 

 they cannot personally verify. 



The teacher of agriculture in our high school this autumn, on coming 

 to the subject of "Injurious and Beneficial Insects," applied to me for 

 the loan of a case of specimens representative of the principal orders 

 and especialh^ of species of economic importance, sajdng that the 

 youths were indifferent to the pictures shown in illustration of the les- 

 sons or objected to them as works of imagination — particularly the 

 boys balked at the cut of Thalessa lunator, as given in Professor 

 Smith's "Economic Entomology." 



"Aw! you can't tell me that there is any such fly as that! How 

 could it manage to get those boring threads into the heartwood of 

 a tree?" said one. 



So happening to have a good specimen of the parasite, I included 

 it among those prepared for the school and great was the wonder and 

 interest excited by a veritable example of the supposedly impossible 

 species. 



For several days, as I was afterwards told, that case of insects was 

 the chief attraction in the building to both teachers and pupils 

 and to a number of those not connected with the school, who 

 wondered how it had been possible to collect so many lovely butter- 

 flies and moths, brilliant and grotesque beetles and other curious and 

 attractive forms in the immediate locality in which they had lived for 

 years — some of them all their lives — without ever having obtained 

 a glimpse of them. 



Needless to say that, after this, the lessons on entomology were 

 not lacking in interest for either teacher or scholars and a most en- 

 thusiastic collecting fancy developed, which led to frequent con- 

 sultations of the text-books for names and further knowledge of 



