— 4 — 



roun' this light." Again, to some of this imaginative race, moths 

 are "bats." I was once formally introduced by one of my ebony 

 friends in Tampa, to a dusky companion, as " De missy what 

 cotches bats." And I did not resent the title but owned the soft 

 impeachment. On another occasion while 1 was watching a friend 

 plying his net at an electric light in Jacksonville, I overheard one 

 little darkey say to his mate : " Yer know what that gemman do'n 

 over thar? He jes' cotchin' them poo' li'le can'le flies, put 'em in 

 a bottle an' make camphire out 'n 'em." Deplorably ignorant you 

 see of the first principles of entomology, knowing nothing of 

 Hubnerian terms, the laws of priority, of Linnseus, Fabricius, 

 Guenee, Say, and their respective claims to originality. In fact, 

 they are utterly lacking in the knowledge of all these things about 

 which you learned scientists love to wrangle. But they are sharp- 

 eyed, nimble-footed, light-handed, and they capture many a rare, 

 desirable insect, just as acceptable to me by their names of crawler, 

 flopper, doodle-bug, snake-doctor or stick-in-the-nuid as if bearing 

 a two-tongued appellation in " linked sweetness long drawn out," 

 and understood only by the favored few. 



But it is not only in conversation with the simple and un- 

 learned that I have found the use of i)opular names advisable if 

 not absolutely necessary. Vou may not believe it, but there are 

 actually some educated and accomplished men and women, 

 scholars in various branches of art, science and literature quite 

 removed from our ])articular field, who do not care to spend the 

 rest of their days in acquiring a new language, or jargon. Such 

 an one I have now in mind. He is an admirable collector and it is 

 to him I owe many, very many of my rarest specimens. He is 

 quite capable of committing to memory the scientific names of our 

 entomological lists, but he has something else to do with his time 

 and brains. So he gives the insects he finds, or looks for, names of 

 his own coining. ,\t this moment 1 can recall but a few. Such 

 are Proteus for that inconstant and variable geometer, Jfypcretis 

 amicaria ; the scallopped sphinx, for Paonias cxca'cati/s, and glowing- 

 eye for a large noctuid whose eyes shine in the darkness like 

 rubies or garnets. He talks familiarly of the checkered moth 

 {Halisidota macitlata) ; the New York moth (C^/x'ivV? /ci/costii^nia) : the 

 grass moth [Drasteria); the falcon-moth [Fhityptci-yx.) : in all of 

 which titles you who are lepidopterists will see a certain appro- 

 jiriateness. Again he will catch at the real scientific name and 

 falling into the natural error we entomologists so soon discard, 

 that these names have always some legitimate meaning, or correct 



