Tour the Smithsonian After its First Fifty Years

To remedy this state of things, Prof. C. V. Riley has been appointed honorary curator. His first act was to deposit his own private collection of insects, "with the idea of using it as a nucleus for the development of a collection fitting the dignity of a national museum."

Professor Riley's collection comprises some 30,000 species, and upward of 150,000 specimens of all orders, and is contained in some 300 double folding boxes in large book form, and in two cabinets containing 80 glass drawers, the specimens being all in admirable condition and the determined species duly labeled and classified. "The collection," wrote Professor Baird, "is chiefly valuable, however, for the large amount of material illustrating the life-histories, habits and economy of species, 3,000 of which are represented in one or all of the preparatory states, either in liquid, in separate boxes, or blown and mounted dry with the imagines. Fifteen blank books are filled with notes and descriptions of these species, most of them yet unpublished. Though several collections surpass it in a single order, few, if any, general collections of North American insects equal it, and perhaps none from a biological point of view."

In addition to the collection proper, Professor Riley has also furnished a large amount of microscopic material mounted on slides, and illustrative of the more minute forms of insect life and their structure, together with much apparatus, such as drying and relaxing-boxes, spreading-boards, collecting implements, etc. An extended description of this collection will be found in Science (New York), November, 1885.

Since this great gift, and the return of the insects heretofore in the keeping of the Dep't of Agriculture, some valuable additions have been made to the Museum in this direction, including Mexican beetles; representative series of the gaudy tropical butterflies of both Africa and South America; plaster casts of the dwellings of Texas harvesting-ants; and the copper-plates and manuscript notes of the late Mr. Townsend Glover, one of the most industrious of American entomologists.

Not much of this material is capable of exhibition, since exposure to the light would ruin many of the specimens; but a few cases are arranged, and more will be added, illustrating the ravages of many species destructive to our food-plants and trees, the cotton, tobacco, etc. This is accomplished not only by showing the insects themselves, in various stages of growth and metamorphosis, with their eggs, cocoons, and so on; but by placing alongside them leaves, buds, twigs, bark, solid wood, or any and every part of a vegetable attacked, bearing the evidence of their evil presence, and showing its destructive effects.

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