232 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 



THE PROTECTION OF INSECTS IN DANGER OF 

 EXTERMINATION. 



By Robert Adkin, F.E.S. 



The task undertaken by the " Committee for the protection 

 of insects in danger of extermination " is of so delicate a nature 

 that one is somewhat diffident in making any comment upon 

 any part of its proceedings, and it must not be thought from 

 what I am about to say that I am not entirely in sympathy with 

 the broad principles of the good work that it has in hand. For 

 my own part, however, I would much rather that the list of 

 species supposed to need special protection had not been pub- 

 lished, as I cannot help thinking that the power of the Com- 

 mittee would be much more felt by collectors if its views were 

 pressed home to them in a general way, and the question of the 

 particular species needing such protection left to the good sense 

 and experience of the individual. If, however, such a list was 

 deemed to be a necessity, would it not have been well to have 

 confined it to the narrowest possible limits, and not to have 

 included in it the names of any species whose sporadic appear- 

 ance tends to show the possibility of their decreased numbers or 

 actual disappearance to be the result of natural causes rather 

 than the act of man ? I take it that the scope of the Committee's 

 work would not extend beyond the latter proposition. 



Without wishing to enter into any general criticism of the 

 list already published {ante, p. 198), many of the species included 

 in which would, I doubt not, appeal for protection from extermi- 

 nation to any thoughtful collector, whether specially indicated or 

 not, I would mention, by way of illustrating my point, two 

 species, my experience of which leads me to believe that their 

 extermination by " over collecting" would be a simple impossi- 

 bility. In July, 1875, I was at Deal, and shall never forget the 

 abundance of pupae of Porthesia chrysorrhoea that I then met 

 with ; the hawthorn hedges in the country lanes, the brambles 

 by the wayside, even the sea-buckthorns on the sand-hills, were 

 full of them ; they might be pulled out of the hedges in bunch cs 

 of half a dozen at a time, and it was no uncommon thing to find 

 three or four spun up in a single bramble-leaf. Had I been so 

 minded, I could literally have collected the proverbial waggon 

 load. Some six years later I again visited the same locality at 

 the same time of year, and should have been glad to have 

 renewed my acquaintance with the species, and in fact made a 

 special journey to the hedges where I had previously found it so 

 abundant, but failed to find it ; nor did the sea-buckthorns on 

 the sand-hills prove any more productive, although I was fre- 

 quently among them for fully a fortnight. About the same time 

 that the species was so abundant at Deal, it was also common in 



