562 
leagues and the world precisely what he 
has seen. If he can not do this with strict 
honesty and good judgment his efforts will 
be worse than useless. Just the extent to 
which the present system of recitations and 
examinations tends to develop honesty and 
common sense I, for one, have never been 
able to clearly determine. 
Having gained admission and taken up 
his freshman work, his first need will be 
that of language. As an investigator he 
will be required to penetrate the unknown 
and tell in clear unmistakable language 
what he saw there. In my own division of 
the Bureau of Entomology there are, or 
have been, over twenty-five individuals, en- 
gaged in certain investigations, whose field 
notes, including name of observer, locality 
and date, are finally copied on library cards 
and filed in the office under the name of 
the insect to which they refer. No one can 
tell when the information contained in 
these records may be required for use, who 
will make use of it, or where the original 
observer will be at that time. He may be 
one, two or three thousand miles away, even 
in another part of the world. Therefore, 
his records must be clear, concise, including 
every detail, but excluding every superflu- 
ous word, in order that any other of the 
division may be able to understand pre- 
cisely what the observer intended to state. 
While the capacity for doing all of this 
should be attained in the freshman year, as 
a matter of fact if you find more than one 
out of every ten or fifteen university grad- 
uates who can do this you may consider 
that you have found an exceptional group. 
This seems to be one of the requisites, not 
obtainable in a university course, but which 
must be secured later. 
If the student has not already had a 
couple of years of Latin in the high school 
he might take it up at once, for the reason 
that it contains the key to nearly one half 
SCIENCE 
[N.S. Vou. XXXV. No. 902 
of the English language, while German 
holds the key to almost all of the other half. 
Both German and French are especially 
rich in scientific literature to which he 
must have easy and intelligent access. In 
his case, it is not a classical but a practical 
working knowledge of these languages that 
is demanded, and if any of these languages 
are eliminated it should be Latin. With 
him it is not a text-book, but a business 
acquaintance with languages, that he re- 
quires. He will very early become aware 
that the German and French scientific lit- 
erature with which he will come in contact 
and which he must read in the original and 
comprehend, is quite different from that of 
the classroom. He will be obliged to pur- 
chase dictionaries and do a lot of self- 
education that will not be recognized in 
ordinary examinations. This need not dis- 
courage him, however, as, probably, his in- 
structor would have to do the same thing. 
A professor of Greek in a theological uni- 
versity once told me, on returning from a 
summer’s sojourn in Greece, that he got on 
very well after he had become familiar with 
the language. Also, at the outset the stu- 
dent should have elementary entomology, 
but it should come in the way of element- 
ary zoology with especial reference to 
insects. Just what text-book is to be used 
here I shall leave to the instructor in ento- 
mology. Those who write text-books in 
zoology usually know little of insects, and 
it is perhaps as well that they do not give 
more about them. The student will need 
to refer to considerable literature any way, 
and the library is the best place to be found 
for keeping text-books; the more they are 
kept and used there the better. Entomol- 
ogy should be studied during the warm 
seasons of the year when insects are alive 
and active, but somehow it happens that 
when insects are alive the student who 
should study them in that condition is too 
