641 
Collecting and Rearing Insects 
When brought home the live specimens must be transferred to “cages” 
or rearing-boxes or jars in which proper food is kept and which enables 
the insect to live as nearly as possible in its normal way. We want our 
caterpillars not merely to provide us with fine “unrubbed” fresh moths and 
butterflies for our collection, but want them to go through under our eyes 
their usual life-history: we wish to see them eat and crawl and moult 
and spin and transform. We wish to get acquainted with the details of 
their living; to watch them grow and develop; and to see them display 
their instincts and insect wits. We may go so far in our scientific curiosity 
as to be led to experimenting with them: to note how they react or behave 
toward light and darkness, toward moisture or dryness, heat or cold; to 
see if they may be induced to modify their inherited instincts to the extent 
of doing new and unusual things, or old things in new ways; to see if their 
life is pure mechanism or in a simpler and more generalized way something 
like ours, in which consciousness and memory and choice play so important 
a part. 
Particularly available and interesting kinds of insects to rear in home 
cages and aquaria are the larvae (caterpillars) of moths and butterflies, various 
leaf-eating, wood-boring, and ground-burrowing beetle larvae, honey-bees 
