34 ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS [Feb., '30 Philip Henry Gosse's Entomology of Newfoundland. Introductory Note by F. A. BRUTON, M.A., Litt.D., 27 Clevedon Rd., Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England. Pbilip Henry Gosse, the English Naturalist, landed at Car-bonear, in Newfoundland, in the year 1827, when he was seven-teen years old ; and for some eight years he was employed in a shipping firm in that country. In May, 1832, he purchased a copy of Adams's "Essays on the Microscope" at a sale at Harbour-Grace, and of that year he wrote: "In 1832 I com-menced that serious and decisive devotion to scientific Natural History which has given the bent to my whole life." In 1835 he left Newfoundland, and bought a farm at Comp-ton in Canada. Here, in the following year, as his biographer tells us, he wrote his first book, entitled : "Entomologia Terrae Novae", which has never been published. Early in 1839 he returned to England, and on the voyage he wrote his "Canadian Naturalist'', which was published in London in the next year, and had a favorable reception. In response to a number of requests from Canada and New-foundland, the late Sir Edmund Gosse searched carefully, but without success, for his father's "Entomologia Terrae Novae". Since Sir Edmund's death, however, the volume has been found by his son, Dr. Philip Gosse. In a small book, with between sixty and seventy pages, there are nearly two hundred and fifty beautiful hand-painted figures of insects, larvae, and pupae, and the pages are headed, in very faint pencil, more or less according to the list of orders and genera given in the twelfth edition of Linnaeus's "Systema Naturae." In this connection, it may be interesting to quote a few sen-tences from the author's preface to his "Manual of Marine Zoology", published many years afterwards. There he says : It is now about twenty-four years ago that, in a land far remote from this, I began the study of Systematic Zoology with Insects. In my ignorance, I attacked it entire and indivisible collect-ing and trying hard to identify everything that I found, from the Cicindela to the Podura. I had not an atom of assistance towards the identifications, but the brief, highly condensed, and technical generic characters of Linnaeus's "Systema Naturae"; over which I puzzled my brains, specimens in hand, many an hour.
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