III.--The Rise and Progress of Entomology in Canada.

By REV. C. J. S. BETHUNE, M.A., D.C.L.,

Head Master of Trinity College School, Port Hope.

(Read May 26th, 1898.)

The early settlers of Canada, in their struggle to make a home in the wilderness of forest that covered the land, had no time and little inclination to devote to the study of the beauties of nature. We do not, therefore, expect to find any records of observations of the butterflies that flitted across the clearings in the summer sunshine, or of the moths that hovered around the candle in the log shanty at night. One of the pioneers of this province, however, Mr. E. A. Talbot, son of the founder of the famous Talbot Settlement, who came out from Ireland with a large party of settlers in 1818, wrote a very interesting book' on his first "Five Years in the Canadas," in which he devotes a chapter to the insects of the country. After remarking that "Some of the Canadian butterflies are very large, and all of them exquisitely beautiful," he describes the ravages of the "locusts and grass-hoppers which infest the whole country, and are often as destructive to the corn-crops in Canada as Sampson's foxes were to the wheat of the Philistines." The horse-fly he speaks of as "the most formidable and relentless foe to whose cruel inflictions the poor quadrupeds of Canada are doomed to submit," and then fills several pages with the torments endured by the settlers from "musquitoes," black flies and house-flies. With regard to the first of these he says: "I am free to confess that if I knew the Deity designed to employ musquitoes as the only instruments in the execution of His revealed threatenings on the unrighteous, I should almost dread the idea of eternal punishment as much as I do at this moment."

Similar references to the discomfort caused by insects may be found in the pages of other books of travel in the early days of the settlement of Canada, but for accurate information regarding the insect inhabitants of this country, we must turn to the published results of scientific exploring expeditions that were occasionally made into these little known. regions. The first of these, as far as entomology is concerned, was under the command of Sir John Franklin, R.N. In the year 1825, he crossed the Atlantic to New York, and with his party proceeded to Canada, where

1 Five Years' Residence in the Canadas: including a tour through part of the United States of America in the year 1823. By Edward Allen Talbot, Esq., of the Talbot Settlement, Upper Canada. London: Printed for Longman, Hunt, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green. 1824. 2 vols., 8vo., pp. 419 and 400.