C log) ) 
is competent to instruct the stranger, who is looking at it, when 
and where it was taken, or if reared from the larva when it 
emerged, and what had been its food-plant, whereas in the other 
drawer all such information is latent in the head of the happy 
possessor of the collection. 
Unless our own education has been so neglected that we set 
no value on information when we have it, the difference between 
the sight of the drawer of labelled insects and the drawer of 
unlabelled ones should be as startling as that between light and 
darkness. 
To the young entomologist, who has plenty of spare time in 
the winter months, and who has kept a journal of his summer 
captures, each of which bears a number, I can recommend as 
most profitable occupation that of attaching labels with date, 
locality, &c., to each specimen. And when this system has been 
regularly pursued for a few years, he will gradually find that his 
old unlabelled specimens lose their value in his eyes; nay, I 
should not wonder if eventually an unlabelled specimen should be 
looked upon as of as little value as any unset or ill-set specimens, 
and without the slightest remorse consigned to the flames. 
Not that I am recommending that any one who has no 
labelled specimens, and no means of attaching labels, for want of 
having had his captures numbered, should at once burn his 
whole collection ; for, though that may be its fate ultimately, it 
is best to proceed cautiously, and a wholesale conflagration 
might cause the loss of some specimens which, owing to the 
very uncertain and irregular appearance of some insects, it 
would be many years before he would have the opportunity of 
being able to replace. 
It is only quite of late years that the value of labelled speci- 
mens has impressed itself so much upon me, perhaps being aided 
by the slips in my memory, but now I feel it is an actual 
wrongful act to place an insect in my cabinet without a label ; 
and I can easily conceive that some of my correspondents have 
mentally thought me (whatever they may have said) “‘ an awful 
bore,” when, instead of simply thanking them for a box of 
specimens they have been so kind as to send me, I have written 
to ask them ‘‘ when and where” they were taken. 
I do not know that I can use any stronger arguments in 
favour of a systematic labelling of specimens; the process 
