The Young Beetle Collector's Handbook

Abstract

THIS work contains twenty coloured plates, comprising about 500 figures of Coleoptera, which may certainly, in many cases, prove of considerable service to the young beetle collector; but the letterpress is of comparatively little value, consisting, as it does, mainly of very short and more or less disjointed descriptions of selected genera and species. In a work with such a title one expects rather to find a detailed description of the methods of procedure as regards capture, habits, habitats, &c, and not to require the young collector to plunge in medias res without such knowledge. The introduction certainly attempts to deal with these points, but it only consists of eleven pages of large print; and the all important subject, in such a work, of “the habits of beetles and how to catch them” is dismissed in about thirty lines.

The Young Beetle Collector's Handbook.

By Dr. E. Hoffman, Curator of the Royal Natural History Museum at Stuttgart; with an Introduction by W. Egmont Kirkby, M.D. Pp. viii + 178. (London: Swan Sonnenschein and Co., Ltd., 1897.)