Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/402

386 hand-book. My experience is, that simplicity is the most necessary guide for the collector, whether in the field or closet. A few tools and some cork-lined boxes will accomplish a great deal in the hands of an expert, while the expensive paraphernalia of the novice will fail of adequate result. As a rule, the most pleasure and information are yielded to the student who gradually increases his stores from his own catching, who follows the moths into their retreats, and by his industry and pertinacity compels Nature to yield to him a measure of her secrets.

Long ago I remember catching moths one summer night in the country, back of Newburg, on the Hudson. What a lovely and perfect night it was! A sheen lay over the grass, and the field-daisies stood tall and pale and spectral in the moonlight. Their white flowers looked like silver crowns, waiting for some love-sick damsel to pluck and gather her fate from the number of their petals. They stood in silver and gold, without envying the yellow and brown daisies of the meadows which were hardly open yet. The air was traversed by leather-winged bats, also out after insects, and I felt convicted by being in their company. A pale-green moon-moth fluttered by the skirt of the dark wood, the long "tails" to her wings trailing like the court-dress of a queen. I stayed my hand and let her sweep by, hoping that those marauding bats might not espy her as she floated in the night-air, heavy with the scent of roses. For aught I saw, she escaped them, and the peril of having her white body devoured, her green wings clipped from her shoulders, falling idly, like the petals of dying flowers, upon the ground.

Painters have not yet learned all they can from the coloring of moths. Some moths are pale-pink and yellow, only these two colors, reminding one of apple-blossoms and yellow moonlight. I saw a panel of C. Colman's once, for the contrast of colors of which it seemed he must have studied the wings of moths. As the musician can use the songs of birds, so the painter may copy the colors of the moths for our greater pleasure and his own benefit. A great deal may be said of the unconscious schooling we get from Nature.

"All sorts and conditions of men" and not a few talented and accomplished women are among the American students and collectors of moths. Before the last quarter of a century, those who interested themselves in America with this department of our fauna were few, and those who published the results of their investigations might be counted on the fingers of one hand. Harris in Massachusetts, Fitch in New York, Kirtland in Ohio, Gosse in Canada, were the best known. Thomas Say, of Philadelphia, published two species in his "American Entomology." But since that time, Professor Packard, Professor Fernald, Mr. Henry Edwards, Mr. F. Pepper, Mr. Lintner, and a number of talented writers, have become familiar names to those interested in the subject in the pages of its literature. The "New York