THE ENTOMOLOGISTS 
WEEKLY INTELLIGENCER. 
No. 230.] SATURDAY, MARCH 2, 1861. [Price Id. 
“I, FIRST.” 
A month later there appeared in the 
same journal a reply from Albatross, 
both to Nemo and Scriptor, and a reply 
from Nemo to Scriptor. 
Albatross wrote as follows: — 
“ I was certainly much surprised, on 
cutting open your journal last month, 
to find that Nemo complained of my 
' 
4 ill-tempered observations,’ and con- 
cluded by comparing me to 4 a dog 
in the manger’ I was certainly not 
conscious of any ill temper when I 
[ 
penned that short paragraph you were 
1 so good as to insert. I was rather 
i amused at the pompous-sounding 4 1, 
first’ with which Nemo had com- 
| menced his notice of the capture of 
Ootes bradgpus, and I thought it only 
an act of kindness to point out where 
he was in error. My last sentence 
respecting ‘the honour of adding the 
i species to our lists being mine ’ was 
written jocosely, and I certainly never 
dreamt any one would suspect me of 
a wish to quarrel with any one on 
so puerile a subject as the first cap- 
ture of a hexapod. If Scriptor was 
beforehand with me in the capture of 
this insect, he is quite welcome to the 
glory he has thereby acquired; but I 
must protest against the practice of 
writing elaborate scientific papers and 
then hiding them in the 4 Transactions ’ 
of some local Society, of which no 
one ever heard. I have asked twenty 
people, and they all say that they 
never before heard of the Natural- 
History Society of Flummery-cum- 
Dumdum ; I have asked botanists and 
ornithologists as well as entomologists, 
but to all the Society is a thing un- 
known ; and furthermore I have tried 
to obtain the 4 Transactions ’ of the 
Society, since Scriptor’s notice appeared 
in your pages, through my bookseller, 
but with no success, the answer I re- 
ceived being ‘out of print.’ One of 
the curses of the present day is the 
multitude of little local periodical 
journals, any one of which mag con- 
tain a valuable scientific paper, where- 
as it is physically impossible that we 
can all keep acquainted with the whole 
of them ; a critical scientific paper 
like that which Scriptor appears to 
have written, ought to have been com- 
municated either to a leading journal 
z 
