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XXI. Some Account of an Insect of the Genus Buprestis, taken alive 
out of Wood composing a Desk which had been made above twenty 
Years. In a Letter to Alexander MacLeay, Esq. F.R.S. and 
Sec. L.S. by Thomas Marsham, Esq. Treas. L.S. 
Read June 19, 1810. 
MY DEAR SIR, 
As every circumstance that tends to the illustra- 
tion of Natural History is particularly gratifying to you, I feel 
pleasure in announcing to you a curious and extraordinary fact, 
in our favourite science of Entomology, communicated to me by 
our Right Honourable friend Sir Joseph Banks, and which I am 
anxious to have laid before the Linnean Society, with a hope 
that it may stimulate others to impart similar and other singular 
facts as they occur, in order that, by collecting and registering a 
number of such communications, a new and beneficial light may 
open into the admirable works of the omniscient Creator, and 
the clouds of darkness that at present overshadow them may be 
removed. — 
On the 3d of January 1810, Mr. James Montague, one of the 
Surveyors to the Corporation of London, on going to his desk 
in the Office of Works at Guildhall, observed an insect, which 
had been seen by his brother in the early part of the day, en- 
3F2 deavouring 
