That, my friends, completes the serious part of what I came all the way from New York to say. Our ignorance concerning insects does not depress me because I feel certain that we shall learn. The insect menace does not frighten me because I believe that we can overcome it if we stop our calamity howling and get dorvn to constructive fundamental rvork. In what follows I invite you to join with me in some of the excursions of a museum man who has had the curious Museum experience of having had charge for more than twenty years of a large taxonomic collection without ever describing a new species or changing the name of an old one.