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Some little thing or other made most of us active naturalists. At the age 
of thirteen, a friend called one day and asked me to go and see a case of 
butterflies made by a youngster a year or two older than myself, who 
had just come up from Newbury in Berkshire to my native town. I 
went; the next day my mother lost a window-blind, and I bought a 
cane. In this way, in 1871, I provided myself with my first net. 
Large pins, small pins, anything that would spike a butterfly or moth, 
were brought into requisition. I became the nuisance and horror of an 
orderly house. At the age of 15 my craze had become a settled form 
of lunacy, and everyone was enjoined to leave me in peace. Of books 
I had Coleman’s British Butterflies, Wood’s Common British Moths, a few odd 
numbers of Stainton’s Manual, and afterwards to complete my treasured 
library,Newman’s British Moths. How I cherished that book ! Living 
within three miles of Chattenden Woods, and within twenty minutes’walk 
of the breezy chalk downs and the charming oak and beech woods of 
sunny Kent, I soon grew to love out-door life with a marvellous passion. 
The most serious blow I received was in 1875, when an odd copy of The 
Entomologist's Monthly Magazine came in my way. I spelt out its Latin 
with slow and laborious care, and read with wonder and horror those 
terrible descriptions of insects from some unknown regions with which 
it was filled. My heart sank within me, and was only lightened by the 
facts that it was a marvellous Colias hyale year, that I was in boisterous 
health, and born I veritably believed to do nothing but catch those charm¬ 
ing Pale Clouded Yellow butterflies. At seventeen, we soon forget our 
first rebuff, and I soon forgot those Latin descriptions, for during the 
next five years I was hard at work. Among other things, I learned to 
read Latin with ease, and to understand, in a way, what Science was. 
xibout 1881,1 first met my friend Mr. Coverdale. We were both essentially 
studious, as well as rabid collectors. He had gone in for a stiff course 
of scientific training, and I had done the same. We had been the only 
two students who passed in the higher stage of Animal Morphology and 
Physiology, at the South Kensington examinations of the previous May. 
We agreed to work together, and for a time did so; but a year or 
two afterwards he went abroad, and, after about nine months, passed into 
the great unknown, whence no word of him has ever reached us—his 
last letter expressing the anticipation that his wife was dying and that 
malarial fever had got its grip on him. From that time onwards, all I 
can say of my entomological work is—Is it not chronicled in The En¬ 
tomologist, The Entomologist's Record, The British Naturalist, and even 
occasionally in that erstwhile dread Entomologist's Monthly Magazine ? 
I did not intend, gentlemen, to write an autobiography, but one’s 
pleasures are written oft-times in one’s self. And do not the inmost 
feelings of many of you respond to mine ? Did not the exquisite 
pleasure of collecting, the charm of a country life, or the chance 
observation of one of Nature’s beautiful productions first cause many of 
of you to collect ? And if the exciting pleasures of youth have calmed 
down into the more tranquil pleasures of manhood, is not the same 
fulness of pleasure ours ? The old feeling is engendered by the woods 
and trees. The exquisite sense of enjoyment recurs when we see the 
Purple Emperor fan his iridescent wings on the same branch of the 
old oak-tree on which we caught our first specimen. Do we not love 
our old haunts, our old nooks, our old friends ? I love the old flowers, 
the old spots, and so I ween do all of us. If science grows out of 
