If you have never seen a moth emerge from its cocoon you should keep several of your cocoons. In eighteen or twenty days the moth comes out, usually in early morning. Invite your friends to have a look, too. Must the moth break the threads in getting out, or is the cocoon woven in a manner to provide a gateway when it shall be needed? How does the creature get out anyway, and what is it like when it first arrives in the open? Wonderful happenings must have been going on inside to make a winged moth out of that naked caterpillar. Something left in the cocoon rattles when you shake it. Examine the dried ball and you will recognize in it the cast-off clothes, hat, coat, socks, and boots that he had on when he shut himself in. There, too, is the brown shell he wore as a pupa. You may think you know these things by reading about them, but you do not, really. Hearsay is not the real thing in any realm of life, least of all in the realm of nature. IX MAKING COLLECTIONS PLANTS Collecting plants has always been an important feature of practical scientific work. Great sums of money and many years of time have been spent in searching through little-explored countries for new plants. Agents of many governments, representatives of great nursery companies of this and other countries are all the time looking, looking, often at the cost of the greatest hardship, for new plants. Why is this? 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 great interest is being taken in plants from western China, a vast and little-explored region. Strangely enough, the plants from that far away country seem to be peculiarly fitted to thrive here, and while the government and the nurserymen are telling the people about these new plants, the botanists are trying to discover the reasons why Asiatic plants fit our conditions better than the plants of Europe seem to. The making of collections of plants, then, is a big, important work, and well worth the while of any boy or girl. If you would read stories of exciting adventures, narrow escapes, thrilling encounters amid romantic surroundings, read some of the accounts of scientific explorations. The collectors of plants and insects in the Philippines, Central Asia, little-known islands of the far East, and such "wild nations," must needs be men of valour, and to know any one of them is a liberal education.