THE PURSUIT OF ENTOMOLOGY. 

 (By the Editor.) 



The difficulties of a pursuit not unfrequently deter many 

 from commencing it. After catching a number of Butter- 

 flies, and of the larger Moths, in those halcyon school-boy 

 days, the incipient Entomologist pauses, perhaps to con- 

 sider whether he shall seriously occupy himself with the 

 subject ; if he is deliberately to form a collection, that col- 

 lection must be arranged. Now comes the first difficulty : 

 it is all very easy work, when a lot of gay-coloured insects 

 are caught, killed and set out and placed " any how " in a 

 large box, and the tyro may even proceed further and ar- 

 range together those specimens that seem to be alike ; but 

 this done, he feels a desire, a pressing urgent desire, for 

 some book on Entomology. When that desire can no longer 

 be restrained, our young Entomologist meets with one of 

 the numerous books written to sell, not to instruct, and 

 fondly imagines that he has obtained an infallible guide; 

 he little thinks that he also has teen sold. He now pro- 

 ceeds, by the help of his new lights, to unravel the mysteries 

 of his tangled collection, and soon discovers the names of 

 some of the most conspicuous; but beyond that he finds a 

 vast mass which, for the present, he must be content to 

 lump together, as unascertained species. One difficulty 

 that soon besets the student is, that the specimen he may 

 have before him may have been a recent addition to our 

 Fauna, and may not have been known to the writer of the 



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