12 



occurred, etc. If it is associated with any special injur}' or trouble 

 affecting the plant or object from which it obtains its food, the fact 

 should be noted. As many details as possible should be briefly or 

 fully noted. Every separate note referring- to collected material 

 should be ninnbered. In regard to the use of numbers, it should be 

 specially remembered that the numbered specimens serve as an index 

 to the notes relating to them. Therefore the same numbers should 

 never be used a second time. The student should start out with the 

 idea of using consecutive numbers as long as he collects insects. At 

 the same time economy should be practiced in the use of numbers, and 

 this can be accomplished in many ways; as, for instance. No. 1 may 

 be made to refer to more than 100 different entries relating to insects 

 collected on the same date and from the same tree. It may be used 

 26 times with a letter of the alphabet preceding it (as al, bl, etc.), 

 26 times more with letters following it (as la), 26 times more with a 

 letter over it, and indeiinitely with decimals or fractions. The object 

 in view is to adapt the numbers to all requirements without the neces- 

 sity of repeating or having them attain inconvenient proportions. 



If the object in view is simply to get the specimens, then the locality 

 and date, with the collector's name, are all that is necessary to accom- 

 pany the specimens in the bottle or on the pin. If the student has 

 ambitions, however, to accumulate material and data which will be of 

 the greatest value, he will give special attention to the accumulation 

 of material which represents more than localities and dates. Our 

 museians and private collections are already oversupplied with this 

 kind of material, which is well enough as far as it goes; but the student 

 who would be satisfied to go no further than this had better not enter 

 the field of forest entomology. His place would be in the museum 

 with dead specimens — a place, by the way, where a vast amount of 

 good and indispensable work is done in systematic study and identifi- 

 cation of specimens; but this is in the line of pure science, while the 

 forest entomologist's ambition should be to contribute to the advance- 

 ment of both pure and applied science. He can do this best by record- 

 ing as man}^ facts as possible about the specimens he collects and 

 observes. 



After the student has progressed far enough to be able to accui'ately 

 identify the principal species as they are observed in the field, ver}^ 

 man}" observations may be recorded without collecting specimens or 

 the use of numbered notes. But this should not be attempted until 

 after years of practical work, and even then it can not be reliable 

 except with such species as are perfectly well known. Observations 

 and records based on field identifications by some of our best ento- 

 mologists have led to much confusion in literature about some of our 

 common insects. This has been abundantly demonstrated by the 

 writer in a recent study of the types of Scolytidas, described by one of 



