ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 53 



in the way of specimens and facts we are continually turning up, by accident, as it were, 

 oftentimes not realizing the full value of our " find " until years afterwards. A careful, 

 faithful observation is never without value, as it either brings a new fact to light or else 

 substantiates an old one. Insects do not necessarily act alike over the entire area of 

 their distribution, and the man or woman who uses their own eyes is almost sure to see 

 something that has not before been observed. Why ! I have gone to your fellow member, 

 Mr. W. H. Harrington, again and again for facts regarding some of our insects that I 

 have been observing for years, but he, with his close observation, has observed things 

 that, if they were to be seen in my locality, were overlooked by me. We do not see every- 

 thing going on about us, by any means, even we that are most in the field, and I have 

 gone several hundred miles from home, and found certain insects there doing certain 

 things that they were not observed to do at home, but as soon as I returned they were 

 found to be engaged in precisely the same way that [ had observed them elsewhere, and 

 probably had been doing so all the time, but I did not happen to be a witness to the 

 fact. 



Of late we are hearing much relative to life zones, and, while it is hardly probable 

 that we have at the present time sufficient definite information regarding the exact local- 

 ities of occurrence among insect? to enable us to say much in regard to these, as it is 

 very easy to say too much, yet we all know that our species are not all of them generally 

 distributed. Almost every collector will get species in his immediate neighborhood, 

 sometimes in abundance, that are to be found rarely, if at all, elsewhere. There are cer- 

 tainly areas, over which a certain species will be found to occur in a greater or less 

 abundance, while a few miles away it will appear to have given way to another. In 

 almost every locality there is sure to be some particular spot that will be found especi- 

 ally rich in insect life. These favored spots may be a bit of woodland, a bank, a shaded 

 ravine or a secluded valley, to which one can go with the assurance that he will secure 

 something rare or new. The vegetation here may not differ materially from that of hun- 

 dreds of other places, seemingly equally favored also by climate and elevation, yet a 

 greater number of species seem to have gained a foothold, so to speak, here than else- 

 where, and, somehow, are able to retain their hold. Just why this is true ib not exclu- 

 sively an entomological problem, but involves animal and vegetable life as a unit, and the 

 insect collector can, if he will, pile up facts that will go a long way toward the settle- 

 ment of problems not at present considered in connection with entomology at all. In 

 other words, before we can do much with mapping out life zones, we must have a vast 

 amount of information that can only be secured by the careful collector and observer. 

 Not only must this data be secured, but it must be made available by being placed on 

 record where it can be found by the great army of scientific men and women. I am well 

 aware that there is in some quarters, an aversion to publishing detatched notes and obser- 

 vations and a tendency to hold fast to all such until a mass of material is thus secured 

 sufficient for an extended and exhaustive discussion, but it has always appeared to me in 

 a different light. Let us suppose that the science of entomology is an immense vase, as 

 large as .^Etna or Vesuvius, and this is shattered into fragments and scattered over the 

 face of the earth, and entomologists, without definite knowledge of its original form or 

 dimensions, are set to work to gather up these scattered fragments and reconstruct the 

 vase. The fragments will of course be of every conceivable size and form and when 

 brought together fit into each other perfectly, but many of them will be much alike in 

 form so that the misplacing of a fragment will not infrequently occur, the mistake only 

 being discovered by the proper one being found and fitted into place. A fragment may 

 include a species, or any fact connected with its life history or habits. Now, let us sup- 

 pose that a collector in Canada or elsewhere discovers a new species, while an entomo- 

 logist in some distant part of the world discovers an allied form. Here are two frag- 

 ments of science, separated, how widely we cannot know, until the intervening space has 

 been filled in by collections, breedings and observations carried on by perhaps a dozen 

 different individuals, possibly speaking half as many different languages, each contribut- 

 ing his fragment that is to fill in the space that divides the two forms and cements the 

 two together, so to speak. Let me illustrate again, taking this time Diaspis amygdali, 



