EMPIRE INSECTS

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 36, 6 November 1933, Page 7

EMPIRE INSECTS

Research Home in London INVALUABLE SCIENCE The building of a permanent home in South Kensington for one of the most precious scientific possessions of the Empire is about to be begun. The vast unrivalled Entomological Collection of the Natural History Museum is to be housed, after yeurs of exile in alien departments, in a building six floors in height and a hundred and forty feet in length, adjoining the western ends of the present Museum block. The final plans for at least one half of this block are about to be completed and confirmed, and work on the erection Itself may begin in the new year. In 1928 the Royal Commission on National Museums and Galleries urged the erection of such a home for the collection as an urgent necessity. Even now, however, the Government is contemplating erecting only the first half of the building, in spite of the additional cost which will ultimately be incurred and the serious hold-up to the permanent housing of a priceless collection. on the study of which the crops of the Empire are in large measure dependent. The collection has no equal abroad. It is an all but complete catalogue and enelyclopaedia of every living insect on the earth, and the gaps in its completeness are tilled in year by year. Its specimens, in their tens of thousands, are standards from which the insect world is named, and scientists who discover new or puzzling insects in any part of the globe send to the experts in charge for information. > One of the most needed benefits of the Entomological Block (which will never be open to the general public) will be the new ease and convenience with which the experts of the Imperial Institute of Entomology will be able to plan- their war against our costliest enemies—locusts, ilies, caterpillars, and all the insect plagues which eat up the crops and imperil the prosperity of an Empire which girdles the world.