424 Analyses of Books. [July, 
must be very common in America, since they cause the note of 
the bird to have “ a second-hand, artificial sound.” 
Reading over this paper we are struck with an instance of the 
feebleness of the so-called Anglo-Saxon race in name-giving. 
There are in America birds, not a few, bearing the same popular 
names as certain European species, but totally distindt. Thus 
the American robin is a kind of thrush. They have a sparrow 
distindt from ours, though, unfortunately for themselves and 
their avi-fauna, they have imported the latter bird. They have 
also a goldfinch and a cuckoo of their own. This identity of 
names leads to confusion, and will never be rectified. 
Report on Insects for the Year 1881. ByJ. Henry Comstock, 
Professor of Entomology in Cornell University. Washing- 
ton : Government Printing-Office. 
It may perhaps strike some of our readers as singular that so 
shrewd and practical a people as the Americans should have en* 
dowed chairs of Entomology in their Universities, and have 
appointed official entomologists in not a few of the States. Such 
a course of adtion will doubtless seem strange to men of mere 
literary culture, to the Popes of days by-gone no less than to the 
Ruskins of the present,- men who will not or cannot observe 
what overwhelming results spring from the' continuous or ubiqui- 
tous adtion of agents individually trifling and feeble. The im- 
portance, or rather the necessity, of attending to the cumulative 
adtion of small things is one of the most precious of the lessons 
taught by our great Darwin, as well in his life as in his works. 
Shrewd and pradtical ? Precisely ; and it is in virtue of that 
very shrewdness and pradticality that the Americans have learnt 
the prodigious power of insedts for good as for evil, and the in- 
terest which consequently attaches to their study. We, too, 
suffer at times heavily — both in the home kingdoms and still 
more in the Colonies — from insedt depredators. But we are slow 
in understanding the lessons of such fadts, and certain of our 
ethicists and sestheticists — blinder even than the utilitarians of 
the old school — still look upon Entomology as a frivolous 
pursuit. 
In the Report before us Prof. Comstock describes certain in- 
sedts, both harmful and beneficial, so that the public may know 
what to kill by every means in their power, and, on the other 
hand, what to spare and to protedt. 
The first species mentioned is the apple-maggot ( Trypceta 
promonella ), a two-winged insedt which in the larval condition 
