A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
J. B. Hodgkinson, a yarn agent of Preston, who died in 1897 aged 73, and his friend, W. H. Threlfall (who still survives) are best known as micro-lepidopterists. They collected together for many years in the country round Morecambe Bay, and their explorations of Witherslack have rendered that locality almost classic ground to the student of the Micro-lepidoptera. Hodgkinson's notes appear continually in the Entomologist of twenty to thirty years ago, and to his energy is due the addition of some six or eight species to the British list of Lepidoptera. His fine collection of some 40,000 specimens was sold at 'Stevens'' and realized about £500.
As has been already said, the school of Lancashire artisan entomologists appears to have almost died out. The present local students of the class belong to a somewhat different social order. With better education and a wider grasp of the general scope of biology, their contributions to entomological science are more likely to survive than was the case with an older generation. Such present workers will be more particularly alluded to in the more detailed treatment of the separate orders which follows.
COLLECTING GROUNDS
The special localities or collecting grounds whence most of our knowledge of the Lancashire entomological fauna is derived may perhaps demand a few words. Since nearly all the workers in this branch of natural history have been dwellers in towns, these localities are principally in the south-west of the county where the population is densest. With a few exceptions, such as the district round Grange and Windermere, the extreme north and north-east still remain entomologically unexplored, and no doubt many species occur there yet unrecorded in our lists.
A district which has maintained, and to a great extent does still maintain a rich and exclusive fauna, is the belt of sandhills which line the coast from the mouth of the Mersey to that of the Ribble.
Although the lateral movements of this littoral zone have been, probably even within the historic period, extensive, yet its characteristic features are of high antiquity, and its fauna is for this reason perhaps the most specialized of the district. The immunity however which these sterile sands have enjoyed for centuries from either cultivation or other industrial operations has to some extent been interrupted by the spread of golf links, and this pastime is probably responsible to a greater extent for the diminution of the littoral fauna all round our coasts than all other human agencies put together. Among these sand dunes occur many otherwise very rare insects, and for a few species this is the only recorded locality in Great Britain. The great peat mosses of the south of the county were formerly favourite collecting grounds. These however within the last fifty years have been very much curtailed and are probably doomed to complete disappearance in the near future.
Of the largest of these, Chat Moss, which formerly extended over some 1,000 acres, there now remain only about 300 acres undrained and
104
