154 ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS. [October, 



read it through he remarked, " how does this fellow get all these 

 names down so fine?" This is a question which is readily an- 

 swered; he lives in New York and in his association with other 

 more advanced students, and in having access to large collections 

 he can readily manage it. This is a rock on which ninety-five per 

 cent, of young beginners are wrecked. We will take this city as 

 an example: I have known not less than six in the past two years 

 that have commenced and have gone to pieces on this rock and 

 fallen by the wayside, and it is most natural. A beginner sees a 

 collection, and is attracted by its beauty, and concludes that he 

 would like to become a collector also, and gets his net and bottle 

 and makes a start. He soon finds that he has a large lot of ma- 

 terial on hand and can't tell one from another, rare fr9m common, 

 or good from bad, and winds up in confusion and disgust. Now, 

 if we had in this country some such works as are to be found in 

 Europe, which give figures of most of the species, and published 

 at a reasonable price, many of the difficulties would disappear, 

 but at present the literature is so scattered, and the illustrated 

 works in this country are so very expensive as to place them out 

 of reach of most of us. Those plates of C. regalis have suggested 

 to my mind that if we had photos like these of the species in 

 this country, or of a considerable portion of them along with de- 

 scriptions of the colors, and if such a work could be gotten out, 

 say at a cost of not over ten dollars, we would find a hundred 

 collectors where we find one to-day. Last season a friend caught 

 a luna moth and brought it thirty-five miles because he thought 

 it a rarity; it would have crushed him if I had mentioned the 

 fact that I had sent over six hundred to London during the same 

 month. About twice a year we get an accumulation of unknown 

 material and send them North for identification; this works pretty 

 well where we have more than one of a kind, but it often hap- 

 pens that we have but one and don't want to box it and run the 

 risk of having it lost or broken. All collectors know how we 

 cherish a single specimen believed to be rare, and in future I never 

 intend to let these single specimens go out of my keeping. I 

 am, therefore, looking forward to the good time coming when 

 we can all have better means of identification, and Entomology 

 becomes more popular and generally studied. I have enumerated 

 some of the rocks, but there are more, and I hope they may be 

 gradually eliminated. 



