154 
NATURE STUDY. 
crossbills in Knox County late in November. Mr. Briggs 
reports the pine grosbeak quite common in Eivermore, 
in Franklin County, late in November. I saw several 
flocks of them while in Farmington on December 28th- 
30th. Also a small flock in Waldo County on Janua¬ 
ry 2d.” 
A dispatch from Reading, Penn., to the New York Tri¬ 
bune states that it is possible that the great collection of 
butterflies made by the late Dr. Herman Strecker may go 
to the American Museum of Natural History, in New York 
City, for, although Dr. Strecker refused many offers of 
thousands of dollars for his collection, it is understood that 
it will now be offered for sale. Dr. Strecker was perhaps 
the greatest collector of lepidoptera in the world. His 
collection contains 250,000 specimens, and is said to be the 
finest in existence. There are only three others which 
compare with it—the collections of the Grand Duke Nich¬ 
olas of Russia, a private museum of Berlin, and the collec¬ 
tion of the Rothschilds in England. Dr. Strecker corres¬ 
ponded and exchanged specimens with all these. The 
other great collections are of butterflies only, and do not 
include moths. The Strecker collection includes butter¬ 
flies and moths whose haunts in life are in every portion of 
the discovered globe, not excepting the regions close to the 
poles, the wildest forests of Africa, India, Australia and 
South America, and the smaller islands of the Indian and 
Pacific Oceans. 
