﻿Il6 FIELD AND FOREST. 



ports in other cargoes. It is not the tubers that these insects specially 

 covet, but the tops of the plants, although they will also feed on the 

 former, when nothing else is accessible 



S. S. RatHvon. 



Museum Godeffroy at Hamburg. 



A very lively book of travels by M. Emile Guimet, entitled Esquisses 

 Scandinaves, has been received at the Smithsonian Institution, in 

 which he narrates all that befel him and his friend M. Chantre on 

 their way to Stockholm to meet the Archaeological Congress which 

 assembled there in 1874. On their way thither they passed through 

 Hamburg, where "in their quality a? strangers and exercising their 

 curiosity as a duty " they found their way to the Museum Godeffroy, 

 of which institution many persons here have desired to receive infor- 

 mation. Occasionally we have seen a copy of the Journal des Mu- 

 seum Godeffroy Geographische, Ethnographische und Naturwissens- 

 chaftliche Mittheilungen, and learned from it that Godeffroy's ships 

 were visiting the most distant oceans, and his agents searching the 

 remote and seldom visited shores and islands, making collections in 

 every branch of science, and with the eargerness of the modern jour- 

 nalist and interviewer, writing down their observations on the spot. 

 The facts thus obtained all of which are curious and new, eventually 

 make up the Journal, which is of quarto form and illustrated in the 

 most liberal manner. Of the objects brought to Europe in the ships, 

 Guimet says, "these collections constitute simply a warehouse of ex- 

 otic varieties, heaped together in one great apartment. It is reached 

 by a small wooden stairway, dark, steep and somewhat worm-eaten. 

 The curators, however, are very obliging and insist that you shall see 

 and handle whatever excites your curiosity." In fact it turns out 

 that M. Godeffroy carries on a great trade in rare zoological objects. 

 You may order from him a rhinoceros, a rattlesnake or a turtle from 

 the Sea of Japan, as you would order from another merchant a bag of 

 coffee or a tierce of rice. The order being received M. Godeffroy at 

 once communicates with his travelling collectors who set off in pur- 

 suit of the article. Such of these as are not eaten by tigers or tram 

 pled to death by elephants, or squeezed to death by boa-constrictors, 

 send word back when the specimen is obtained and forward it to 

 Hamburg by the first courier. 



