Iron County register. [volume] (Ironton, Iron County, Mo.) 1867-1965, 1888-12-06
WORTHY OF STUDY.
The World Teeming with Countless nh
jects tor Mans Investigation.

The World Teeming with Countless oh.
Jects tor Mans Investigation.
Ihe man who limits himself to the
study of British butterflies has by no
means difficult task before him. If he
aspires to know nothing more about
them than the names to which they are
scientifically entitled. But when the
Investigation of their life histories Is
entered upon and all their varying
stages examined, their food and their
depredations in each of these stages
noted, he will find that years
will slip away without the pleas
ant task being half finished.
When the philosopher at the Autocrat's
breakfast table Indignantly rejected
the title of entomologist, being ambi-
ton of no loftier name than that of
coleopterist. or even of ''scarabaist,
he proved himself aware of the ampli-
tude of the order to which he devoted
his toilsome days and harmless nights.
But the lepidopterists. for whose COM
paratively narrow field he had some
thing like contempt, can claim scarce
ly less legion-like range of objects on
which to expend their care. Every
scale on every butterfy's wing is an
object of beauty and of the most intri-
cate design, and there is not single
species the anatomy of which is
exactly the same as that of its nearest
relation, or the transformations of
which do not reveal some curious diff
ferences. A Dutch etomologist is said
to have pade fifteen different dissec-
tons of the cockchafer's thigh before
he considered the labor he had under
taken closed; and yet there is not an
insect, from the largest to the most
minute. which is not equally worthy of
the same pains from any man who does
not regard all toll wasted, except what
is spent in eating and drinking,
making money and spending it.
The lepidopterist is. however, not
without strong claims on the gratitude
of mankind for, through his inquiries
the history of many of our most de-
structive garden and field pests have
been made clear, and their mischievous
career checked at an early stage. So
useful, indeed, has the economic ento-
mologist proved. that nearly every State
of the American union supports an en-
tomological bureau, and now that an
agricultural department has been es-
tablished in Whitehall, an entomolo-
gist has been one of the first of it's ap-
pointments. Even if he goes no fur
Their than the circumventiOn of the
caterpillars of the sc British
butterflies and the 1,91O species
of British moths, he will have
his hands full, without attending
to the beetles and the flies, the locusts
being happily not within his province.
But the annual South London exhi-
bition-which, temporary though it is,
constitutes the only museum south of
the Thames, which the world at large
is free-ranges over wider field than
the British insects. And the moment
we pass beyond the limits of these
islands the number of butterfly species
increases. In Europe there are
no fewer than four hundred.
Within an hours walk of Para, in
Brazil, Bates found 700 species, while
over the whole world, though it is not
One-half explored from the entomo-
logical point of view, there must be
over 5000 different kinds of lepidop-
ferrous insects. Each of these forms
has its own life history. from the egg
to the perfect insect, it's own plants on
which it preys as caterpillar, and its
own food when it attains to adult con-
dition, though thousands of them are
separated from their nearest allies by
the most minute.-Londo,s
ReUieU.