THE ENTOMOLOGIST’S 
WEEKLY INTELLIGENCER. 
No. 44.] SATURDAY, AUGUST 1, 1857. [Price Id. 
YOUNG BARNES. 
The next half-year there were several 
new hoys at the school where young 
Barnes was, and amongst them one 
Francis Weldon, who had a partiality 
for catching butterflies, and who, in 
consequence of his preferring sauntering 
down a lane by himself to playing with 
the other boys, was considered rather 
“ soft and spooney some who had seen 
him busy impaling an unfortunate in- 
sect with a pin said “ it was only girls 
who used pins,” and nicknamed him 
“Fanny.” But, in spite of all this 
(which Fanny Weldon bore with im- 
perturbable good humour), the butterfly- 
catching mania spread, and one by one 
many of his tormentors themselves be- 
came “ spooneyfied.” 
Young Barnes also caught the pre- 
vailing epidemic, and took to it the 
more kindly as he had already got all 
the pen-knives and pencil-cases that 
were worth getting, and felt rather in 
the forlorn condition of Alexander, when 
he sighed because “ there were no more 
worlds left to conquer.” Thus it was 
that young Barnes became an ento- 
mologist, — an event which, difficult as 
it would have been for any one to have 
foreseen such a sequence at the time, 
had great influence on the future de- 
velopment of the Science. 
Of course young Barnes was not con- 
tent with the good things he caught 
himself, — he wanted all the good things 
that everybody else got. Fanny Wel- 
don (I am obliged to call him “Fanny,” 
for it was a name that stuck to him 
all the time he was at school) had 
caught, one fine May morning, on a 
little heath, not far from the school, a 
Green Hair Streak, and it was the first 
Thecla Rubi that had ever been seen 
by Mr. M‘Pherson’s scholars. The in- 
sect was critically examined by all the 
juvenile collectors, and young Barnes 
no sooner saw it than he wanted to 
have it. 
Of course you wonder why he did not 
go to the heath where it was taken, 
and try to find one for himself, be- 
cause, in all probability, where there 
was one there would be more; but 
your surprise merely shows that you 
little understand young Barnes, — why, 
he was a greedy boy, who never saw 
anybody else with anything nice but 
immediately he wanted to have it him- 
self! 
The next day young Barnes pro- 
duced a new sort of white butterfly, 
which he said he had found in the 
lane: the edges of the wings were 
curiously scolloped, and the scollops on 
the right and left wings were not 
exactly alike. It evidently must be a 
new species, — so they all thought. 
T 
