The Library of Work and Play: Outdoor Work

AN

Not as you will readily conclude, merely to add new specimens to museum collections, nor merely to find and name a new species, though some collectors are in the field for these purely scientific reasons. But our Department of Agriculture is on the lookout for new plants from foreign parts which will be commercially valuable to us. Our enterprising nurserymen are after the same game. At the present time very

arrow escapes, thrilling encounters amid romantic surroundings, read some of the accounts of scientific explorations. The collectors of plants and insects in the Phi

our arts, buying and selling them daily, unable to get through an hour of the day without being constantly reminded of our entire dependence upon the members of the vegetable kingdom, what is more natural than that we should wish to know them? To know their names is not the end and aim of plant study. The name is a convenient handle for a plant. It enables you to talk about the plant to others without the necessity of a lengthy description. It enables you to read understandingl

xample. Knowing its characteristics you pass it by without touching it. You observe it from afar off, so as to be able to warn others of its whereabouts. On the o

he materials needed are not expensive nor hard to get. Here

en or so

or three dozen

ards, 12 ×

twenty to thirt

unting

enus

laced in a folded piece of this. The driers may be cheap blot

rs be crowded so that the appearance will be awkward. But do not overdo this: if a flower droops naturally, do not make it stick upright. With one of the boards as a foundation build your pile of pressing plants up as follows: Lay on two or more driers, then a folded newspaper holding a specimen, then a drier or t

le, building up with fresh driers as before. In a week or ten days most plants will be thoroughly dry. If at all moist they a

a cent a sheet, size eleven and one half by sixteen and one fourth inches. No other size would be acceptabl

have a lot ready to mount. Then with a pot of glue, a dry cloth, a damp one, and a small brush you are ready for business. Lift the specimen from the newspaper and lay it first on the mounting sheet to get some idea beforehand of how you will place it. You may have to prune it some to get it all on, but this is not likely as your drying sheets are the same size as your moun

he sheet, and if more than one specimen is required to show all parts the

mounted on pape

you like and referred to the specimen by a number while in the press. Finally each mounted specimen should have its label, bearing the name of the plant, the collector's na

unprotected. Each group of them should be put into a folded sheet of manilla paper. Such a holder is

t. The collection is for study or it is worth nothing. Knowing plants is more important than knowing names. You cannot handle plants much and observe them in their places without noticing how different they are. Then you begin to see that some are more like than others. This is the beginning of classification. You need not know even the common names

d deal you will be surprised to find how easily

the place of the plants themselves, you would better throw your money away than buy it. Instead of helping it will hinder your progress. You will find in beginners' botanies what is known as a "key." Now, a key is obviously to unlock something with. If you

ne begins by dividing the whole vegetabl

hich never

which do ha

the present forget all about the others and begin to divide

wering

ones (usually), leaves needle-or

in cones, leaves of various

distance over from the margin of the page as B although it may not be on the same page, if there are a great many divisions under B. These little things make the key easier

to study and it is possible with a reasonable amount of persistence and by exchanging with fern collectors in other parts of the country to get a very nearly if not quite, comp

tions will have several kinds of violets, blue, white and yellow, in all the beauty of their flowering. But whoever thought of getting one that showed the seed pods? What is a violet's seed pod like anyhow? Is the seed pod of the white one like that of the yellow? Are the seed pods of one plant all alike? When do the pods open and how? How do the seeds germinate and when? These and other questions are

es, kinds of roots, kinds of stems, kinds of inflorescence. What a boon to those teachers would be a collection put up to illustrate t

every bit of it alone. A small printing frame, blue print paper of the required size, and plenty of water is all that is required. A child soon learns to use good judgment in printing, exposing the

k on the clean glass, and work it into a thin film over the surface. Lay a leaf upon this film of ink and go over it with the inky roller. Transfer the leaf to a sheet of paper and cover with a second sheet. One whirl of the clean roller ought to give you the desired print. It is surprising how delicate and true these are and how perfec

all never forget the look of indignation our dear old professor gave an ambitious youth who had uprooted for his paltry collection every plant of a species of rare fern which the professor had been trying for years to re-establish in its old location. After all is said and done, a liv

TING S

miliar with that musical p

e sea is a

le mullet and

at Santa Catalina Island or elsewhere, and see for himself that those "yellow and scarlet tufts of ocea

ried inside the larger. A heavy knife may be useful, too. The best time is after the spring-tides, because at the lowest ebb of the water one may find forms of great beauty and brighter colours than elsewhere. The rocks, the rubbish left by the tide, the pools

roots. Many of them are so shaped that they appear to have stems, roots, and leaves, but as these parts do not do the work of true stems, roots, and leaves they are not classed as such. The root

ter. This is what the pails are for. Every part of the plant should be taken, as the attachment to the rocks is as

Unless dried soon after gathering they will decay and fade. In collecting, try and get plants of various sizes even though they look alike. The larger ones may be

y making a few souvenirs of your summer at the shore, your own taste is the only thing to be considered. You will require genus covers, labels, etc., just as for flowering plants. For the work of mounting you will want plenty of driers, some pieces of muslin the same size, sheets of standard siz

ed on paper of

should be a broad one for now you are to slip your sheet of mounting paper right into the water and get the plant onto it, floating it out in a natural attitude. This takes a knack, you may be sure, but the knack can be acquired with practice. If you can provide yourself with a pane of glass to lay the sheet upon when you take it from the water you will have the best conditions. Some people get along very well with a shallow plate. Some of the delicate parts will be certain to cling together as you lift them out of the water, but you can remedy that by dipping a few drops of water onto them and with your needle you can arrange them as you wish. Take your time. This is not a job for a person in a hurried mood. Examine and admire each piece as you work at it. Make it yours for all time, although you may sell it the following day a

ou wonder that the first navigators, sailing uncharted seas, were alarmed by this vast expanse and thought of course there were concealed shallows beneath the feathery fronds of this gulf weed? You must read, too, of some of the giants of the sea-weed tribe; the "devil's apron," the "sea-otter's cabbage," with its air-vessel as big as a hogshead, and its stalk a slender cord hundreds of feet in length. These are all alg?, and so are the

CTING

enjoy, too, and they are never attacked, so far as I know, by what we call museum pests, those destructive little creatures which make life a burden to the owners of collections of insects, plants, stuffed birds, an

ou can begin one this summer or any time that you visit a beach, and add to it daily if you are spending the summer on the shore. As your collection and your interest grow, you can exchange specimens common on your coa

nter with the tide, and some will be pierced with small round holes too neatly ground to have been made by accident. These holes give you a hint as to why this shell is empty for they are the work of a band of little pirates which live by boring into their neighbours and sucking their life-blood. Many of the dead shells

sh and a few shells, most of them not worth picking up, has awakened into life. Every pool has become as a village, its inhabitants engaged in a variety of occupations. The smooth sand is inhabited.

urse, but you are more likely to find a great variety of things at the very lowest tide. You have heard of planting "by the moon" and you are right in supposing that the moon has little influence on potatoes and cabbages. But to go collecting on the sea-shore "by the moon" is quite reaso

obably elude you. Watch for bubbles and jets of water and dig frantically. You will be able to work up speed after a few trials and land your "fish." After some practice you will be able to unearth many living things you little suspected of being there. Crabs of various kinds are common and sea-worms of rainbow colo

and or these are washed in by the tides. They are no less wonderful than the shells, for they are chapters in the

bundant everywhere. You can read the story of this fellow in any book on shells. Take some of the stories about him with a grain of

se would be difficult to transport but will be of greatest value if you are studying the structure of the mollusks. If you wish to preserve the she

the note-book habit. Many a collector who trusts to his memory finds himself sadly at a loss when he comes to work with his specimens and especi

TING I

ked on with a sort of pitying suspicion. He or she was thought to be the victim of a mild form of lunacy, which might or might not take violent shape. All that is past now that insect study has grown so importa

But collecting wild plants about your own door yard and in the woods is tame work compared to insect capturing. Your eye marks

simple and inexpensive. For general collecting,

A n

illing

sect

sect

ir active flight, their beautiful colours, and wonderful variety of form all help arouse the interest. As the collection grows you will find that many insects can be captured

needed for a

ndle about three feet in length.

enough to fit around the handle. (Why not use

of heavy wire. (No. 3 g

e fourths of a yard. (Get a good

ge for his help in making the net. That piece of wire is to form the ring which holds the cheese cloth bag; the ring must be fastened securely into the end of the handle. Bend the wire into a circle a foot in diameter, then bend back thr

ect

ding the bottom neatly. Cheese cloth is the worst stuff to ravel, and if you sew the bag with a single seam you will soon be sorry. Pin the cloth so that the two edges are exactly together and sew a seam about a quarter of an inch wide all the way round. Now turn the bag inside out and fold it so that the seam you just made will be right on the edge. Sew another seam, three eighths of an inch deep this time. The ra

all the time, the other for special trips for large things. For the first a small olive oil bottle, a test tube, or any convenient siz

d is an inch long. A cork any shorter than

ur father will not let you buy it. But if you convince your mother that she can trust you to use a cyanide bottle as it is intended to be used, her objections will melt away. Just as likely as not she

full of plas

ing

umps of cyanide to entirely cover them. Put in on top of this all the dry plaster of Paris the water will take up. Let the bottle stand open for an hour or so, then wipe it out with a rag, which may be burned afterward. Put in the cork and

its wings to pieces in the box, said: "It ought-a be dead. He in cy'ni' bot'l' a' night." I should

ING I

ings half folded, the pins used were short common pins, and every specimen was disfigured with masses of verdigris, they were pinned into rough boxes in higgledy-piggledy fashi

ought from dealers in entomological supplies and a hundred each of Nos. 3 and 5 will cost thirty cents. With them your collection may be salable, and you may exchange y

preading-board, sh

unt your first specimen properly without a spreading-board. The drawing of one which appears on this page will tell you more about how to make as well as how to use it than any amount of description. If y

ng-boar

rt-lived and that this one would have been eaten by a bird within an hour or two anyhow. The cyanide is the least painful form of dying for the butterfly. Its work is probably done, already. You can prove that you do not kill insects for the fun of seeing them die, by putting the bottle back in your pocket where they can d

it will come out in the middle on the under side of the thorax. One fourth of the pin's length should remain above the insect. This may seem a small matter but insects unevenly pinned look badly, and it spoils their salability. You will want some black-headed pins for use on the spreading-board. Common pins hurt the fingers, insect pins are too flexible and expensive. Pin strips o

to pin com

bugs (which ought to be called May beetles), and potato bugs (which are also beetles). If you put a pin through the centre of

h the thorax, between

into easily, must at the same time be elastic and firm enough to hold the pins. Cork, linoleum, and slices of pith are all used. You may have noticed, though, if you have been to a large, up-to-date museum, that the specimens of insects are all pinned into solid blocks of wood. Many an hour I have spent pinning specimens into blocks in their permanent places in a great museum collection. It is hard work and has to be done with a tool. When once fastened on a block the insect is supposed to be a fixture; when it moves t

pped ins

SIFI

ome, like the blundering June bug, have their wings so placed that a straight line appears down the middle of the back. These belong together, regardless of their colour, size, shape, habits, or other considerations. They belong to the order Coleoptera. Grasshoppers, katydids, and crickets belong to another group and can be pinned together. All the flies have two wings, and belong in a group apart from all the four-winged ones. The dragon flies go together. You will have representatives of other orders, less easy to distinguish, but by the time your collection has grown to this extent you will be ready fo

Perhaps your manual training teacher will be willing to let you build a box under his direc

t. Other insects are frankly aquatic and you can get them only by dipping your net in. It is well to have a second net if you expect to do much water collecting as the cloth is hard to smooth out after a wetting. As a majority of insects are vegetarian you will naturally seek among plants for specimens. If the winged forms are not eating the foliage you may discover that they are laying eggs on the leaves of the food plant on which their young must develop. If you live in town you will find it worth while

ISTORY C

ansformed into balls, or pod-like or cone-like affairs which do not look natural. These things are sure to arouse your curiosity. Sometimes the answer to your question is right there. Cut open a swollen golden-rod stalk and you will find the culprit which caused the plant to grow that way. But how did the footless, helpless grub get there and when? You b

about the observer who first studied out this secret. He did not get his knowledge from books. He patiently watched the mud-dauber going about h

ocking the larder. Knowing the tastes of her yet unborn young, she leaves for a time the mud hole, and visits the haunts of certain spiders. Finding one to her liking, she captures it. Not appreciating the fact that the law forbids the use of preservatives in meats, she injects a drop of some wonder-work

length. How do you know that they are young grasshoppers and not fully grown ones of some tiny race? Look at one closely and you will see a look of youth about him that is unmistakable. He is fuzzy, his head is too big for him, his legs out of all proportion to the rest of him. Then, too, he has no wings, just little buds

kets, of the true bugs which include the squash-bugs, the chinch-bug, the stink-bug and others. Of most of the other orders this is not true. The young do not look at all like the adults. In many cases as, for example, the dragon fly and the mosquito, they are fitted in the immature stages to a life in the water. They must, on this account, have organ

lled caterpillar or incorrectly worm, or grub, or maggot), on to the pupa, then to the adult. The egg of an insect is often a most beautiful object. With a hand lens, which every collector will surely need, one can see its delicate colouring, its pearl-like

. In this process the entire old skin is shed, an operation well worth seeing. Under the old coat a new one has formed, which being larger, accommodates it

ding the larval skin, find themselves each clad in a sort of horny coat of mail. We call these chrysalides. Some larv? creep away into the ground, there to shed their o

s of insects death follows soon after. There are some noted exceptions to this rule as for instance the wasps which build with so much skill and patience the homes in which to rear their young, the ants and the bees, both social and solitary, which car

the clusters of milk-weed along the roadside or anywhere, in the forenoon of a sunny July or August day. A few butterflies are probably flitting about in rather casual fashion. Watch them light on the leaves, mark the leaf with your

own a young monarch is striped with rings of greenish yellow and black. Though handsome as to colour scheme, this caterp

you may have to content yourself with making a sketch of it on a small square of drawing paper. Pin the leaf or the drawing in the box. It is not easy to keep specimens of caterpillars. There is a method of preparing the inflated skins, but as the process is a difficult as well as a ghastly one, you can wait till you go to college to learn it. For the milk-weed caterpillar I suggest instead, a coloured drawing. When your caterpillars are full-sized they will

CT H

was lucky enough to find, when on a collecting trip one day, a curious structure made of mud on a weed stem. It was declared by the professor to be an ants' "cow-shed." Knowing that the museum specimen was in a bad state of re

. But dried butterflies, fastened in utterly unnatural attitudes upon dried plants they would scorn to eat in life, fr

x hundred dollars was the sum realized, I believe. Those of you who have read Mrs. Gene Stratton-Porter's story "The Girl of the Limberlost" remember that "the girl" sold Indian relics and insects enough t

le and female, she made breeding cages and reared the moths and butterflies. She dug in the earth about the tree roots and other "likely" places for pup?, she searched the shrubs and vines and trees for hanging cocoons, she brought in innumerable eggs, caterpillars, and chrysalides and the story of her successes and failures fills many delightf

NG IN

eding-cage

ther in the form of a cylinder or fasten it every six inches with paper fasteners. (Any way to keep it together good and tight.) Push the screen down inside the box till it touches the bottom, put the lid on and you are ready for business. If the screen is too wide you will have trouble

l moths, was accidentally left near an open window over night. The next morning between twenty and thirty moths of that species were found

trunks of trees and visiting the baits later in the evening with cyanide jars and capturing the specimens which are attracted by the odour to the feast

opes in city parks where there is some protecting undergrowth, anywhere about the old groves surrounding country homes. Windy or wet nights are not the best for sugaring, neither are moonlight nights. The ideal night

coction recommended by one collector

nds dark

New Orlean

have been allowed to stand uncorked in

d four ounces of Jamaica rum. Cork loosely and keep in a cool place. The strong odour of this mixture pervades the air

ave a pair of light pincers to take specimens out with. If all are emptied out at once some will dry too much before you are ready to spread them. Every time they are handled they

carriers. He will witness many acts of heroic self-denial, some feats of strength, endurance tests, and acrobatic turns. He will admire the ingenious architecture and wonder at the never ending variety of forms, colours, and markings they exhibit. Many questions will come up in the course of his studies. He may seek