6 THE COCKROACH. 



notes, he never published again. Failing eyesight was one 

 ground of his retirement from work. What he had been able 

 to finish, together with a considerable mass of miscellaneous 

 notes, illustrated by fifty- four plates from his own hand, w r as 

 published, long after his death, in the Memoires du Museum 

 (XVIII.-XX.). 



Straus-Diirckheim on the Cockchafer. 



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In beauty and exact fidelity Straus-Diirckheim's memoir on the 



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Cockchafer (Considerations Generales sur 1' An atomic Comparee 

 des Animaux Articules, auxquelles on a joint P Anatomic Descrip- 

 tive du Melolontha vulgaris, 1828) rivals the work of Lyonnet. 

 Insect Anatomy was no longer a novel subject in 1828, but 

 Straus-DiArckheini was able to treat it in a new way. Writing 

 under the immediate influence of Cuvier, he sought to apply 

 that comparative method, which had proved so fertile in the 

 hands of the master, to the Articulate sub-kino-dom. This 

 conception w r as realised as fully as the state of zoology at that 

 time allowed, and the Considerations Generales count as an 

 important step towards a complete comparative anatomy of 

 Arthropoda. Straus-Diirckheim had at command a great mass 

 of anatomical facts, much of which had been accumulated by his 

 own observations. He systematically compares Insects with 

 other Articulata, Coleoptera with other Insects, and the Cock- 

 chafer with other Coleoptera. Perhaps no one before him had 

 been perfectly clear as to the morphological equivalence of the 

 appendages in all parts of the body of Arthropods, and here he 

 was able to extend the teaching of Savigny. His limitations are 



O O .' 



those of his time. If in certain sections we find his collection 

 of facts to be meagre, and his generalisations nugatory, we 

 must allow for the progress of the last sixty years a progress 

 in which Straus-Diirckheim has his share. It is the work of 

 science continually to remake its syntheses, and no work 

 becomes antiquated sooner than morphological generalisation. 



It is therefore no reproach to Straus-Diirckheim that his 

 treatise should now be chiefly valuable, not as " Considerations 



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Generales," but as the anatomy of the Cockchafer. Long after 

 his theories and explanations have ceased to be instructive, when 



