Insect Collecting
Because most insects are small and the majority cannot be identified without the examination of minute morphological characters, entomologists often make and maintain insect collections. Very large collections are conserved in museums or colleges and universities where they are maintained and studied by specialists. Many college course require students to form small collections. There are also amateurs entomologists and collectors who keep collections.
Historically insect collecting has been widespread and was in the Victorian age a very popular educational hobby. Insect collecting has left traces in European cultural history, literature and songs (e.g., Georges Brassens's La chasse aux papillons (The Hunt for Butterflies)). The practice is still widespread in many countries, and is particularly common among Japanese youths.
Since most types of insects have hard exoskeletons that retain their form after the insects dies, it is easy and practical to form a collection.
Read more about Insect Collecting: Further Reading
Famous quotes containing the words insect and/or collecting:
“The insect fable is the certain promise.”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism—victimless collecting, as it were ... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)