If time permits you should visit your clump of milk-weed daily or better still take home the eggs and the young caterpillars. Keep the food plant fresh in a jar of water and get more when needed. As you want a specimen of the egg-shell for your collection, you must be on the spot when the young caterpillars come out. They sometimes eat the shell the first thing. It is a delicate operation to glue a thing as frail as this shell onto a dried milk-weed leaf, and 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 transform into chrysalides. It is worth sitting up all night to see a sight like this. When a caterpillar spins a little mat of silk and suspends itself by a tail-hook, you will know that the performance is about to begin. The chrysalis is a lovely light green with spots of gold upon it. All this beauty was hidden under the skin of the caterpillar. With an egg, a caterpillar, a chrysalis, and an adult you have all four stages of the monarch's life represented. INSECT HOMES Nothing in the insect world interests me more than their homes. The collector sees many of these in his rounds, and begins to consider how he can complete his series by adding samples of them as specimens to his collection. I 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 repair I readily offered my find to replace it. The professor refused the gift, but offered me what he thought it was worth. I accepted and bought a pair of shoes with the money, which shows that these things have a market value. It is well to press a specimen of the favourite food plant of a species of insect and make it a part of the collection. But dried butterflies, fastened in utterly unnatural attitudes upon dried plants they would scorn to eat in life, framed or put under glass globes on the parlour table do not appeal to the naturalist. They are "fakes" pure and simple.