Ego & the Entomologist

An old gag tells of a counterfeiter who became so puffed with success that he began putting his own picture on the currency he printed. Husky, 26-year-old Elphinstone Forest Gilmour was not a counterfeiter but a student of entomology whose interest in his subject earned him the right to prowl at will among the 13 million beetles in South Kensington's Natural History Museum. Gilmour joined the Royal Entomological Society, wrote for the society's journal a knowing discourse on a black and yellow beetle called Tmesisternus laterimaculatus. He boasted that the beetle was "unique in my own collection."

This led to the discovery that the museum's own Tmesisternus laterimaculatus, captured 15 years before on an uninhabited New Guinean island, was missing. At Gilmour's home Scotland Yard found 5,141 missing bugs. The hot beetles, insisted Gilmour, had merely been borrowed for further study. But this, decided a magistrate, scarcely explained why the student had sold 16 museum specimens to other collectors. He gave Gilmour three months' opportunity to study roaches in a local jail.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.