AMERICAN INSECTS 



CHAPTER I 



THE STRUCTURE AND SPECIAL 

 PHYSIOLOGY OF INSECTS 



ERHAPS no more uninteresting matter, for 

 the general reader or entomological amateur, 

 can be written about insects than a descrip- 

 tive catalogue of the parts and pieces of the 

 insect body. And such matter is practically 

 useless because it doesn't stick in the reader's 

 mind. If it is worth while knowing the 

 intimate make-up of a house-fly's animated little body, it is worth 

 getting this knowledge in the only way that will make it real, that is, 

 by patient and eye-straining work with dissecting-needles and micro- 

 scope. This book, anyway, is to try to convey some information about 

 the kinds and ways of insects, and to stimulate interest in insect life, rather 

 than to be a treatise on insect organs and their particular functions. Life 

 is, to be sure, only the sum of the organic functions, but this sum or com- 

 bination has an interest disproportionate to that of any of its component 

 parts, and has an aspect and character which cannot be foretold in any com- 

 pleteness from ever so careful a disjoined study of the particular functions. 

 And so with the body, the sum of the organs: it is the manner and seeming 

 of the body as a whole, its symmetry and exquisite adaptation to the special 

 habit of life, the fine delicacy of its colors and pattern, or, at the other 

 extreme, their amazing contrasts and bizarrerie, on which depend our first 

 interest in the insect body. A second interest, although to the collector and 

 amateur perhaps the dominant one, comes from that recognition of the 

 differences and resemblances among the various insects which is simply 

 the appreciation of kinds, i.e., of species. This interest expanded by oppor- 

 tunity and observation and controlled by reason and the habit of order and 

 arrangement is, when extreme, that ardent and much misunderstood and 

 scoffed at but ever-impelling mainspring of the collector and classifier. 



