A Penny Weekly Magazine of Natural History. 



No. 33. JUNE 12th, 1880. Vol. 1. 



CAPTURES. 



WE confess we are somewhat dis- 

 appointed that we have had so 

 few notices of capture this season from 

 our readers. We have pleasant recol- 

 lections of the time when the Intelli- 

 gencer used to come out weekly, and 

 everyone knew what everyone else was 

 doing. Entomologists Calenders, and 

 Monthly Lists, and all that sort of 

 thing are very well in their way, but 

 the record that an insect ought to 

 occur at a certain time is not half so 

 good, nor so interesting, as to know 

 that Mr. Jones or Mr. Smith has taken 

 it, and that Mr. Brown saw one, but 

 had not his net with him, and Mr. 

 Eobinson had a beauty brought to him 

 by a boy. There seem to us to be 

 three reasons why records of captures 

 are so few now-a-days. First, Ento- 

 mologists have got out of the way of 

 doing it. The Monthly Magazines have 

 not room for it, or if they have, the 

 record is stale before it reaches the 

 reader. Captures in the last week in 

 May cannot be read in the Monthlies 

 till the beginning of July, and it is no 

 use then unless the captured specimen 

 be so rare an insect as always to be 



worth publishing. A collector goes 

 out for the day, and takes a dozen or 

 twenty species, not of universal distri- 

 bution, not "common everywhere," 

 but still not rare enough to make it 

 worth while filling up as many lines, a 

 month or six weeks afterwards. A 

 record made at the time, would, or 

 might, have helped a score of other 

 collectors to obtain at any rate some 

 of the species. Thus Entomologists 

 were glad to send such notices to a 

 weekly paper, and the Editor was glad 

 to publish them. They are not sent to 

 the Monthlies, and would not be pub- 

 lished if they were, because, as we have 

 already said, the time for their useful- 

 ness is past before they can reach the 

 reader. The second cause for this 

 dearth of records seems to be, that so 

 much more is known now among ex- 

 perienced collectors, that the element 

 of chance is almost eliminated. We 

 want a certain insect, we know when 

 and where to get it, and there the 

 matter ends. It is a vent, vedi, veci, 

 sort of business, and we doubt if it be 

 half so pleasant as collecting in the 

 good old days when we went out, not 

 knowing what we would get, and per- 



