INTRODUCTION 



Wh Ten years ago I felt sure that there was 



little excuse for additional general ento- 

 mologies. The market seemed full of popular, semi- 

 popular and unpopular books, each apparently attempting 

 the impossible the covering of a boundless field. Since 

 then a hundred, or more, new works on the subject have 

 appeared and lo! here is still another because, in the 

 meantime, it has been my privilege to come in rather close 

 contact with the laity, having been the official answerer 

 of all sorts of questions from " How much is a moth worth? '' 

 to "Why are bedbugs? " I take this opportunity of taking 

 up some of the intermediate points. 



When the publishers of this series spoke 

 about a Field Book of Insects, to be a 

 companion to the excellent books already published, we 

 began to deal with the arithmetic of large numbers. 

 There are, for example, approximately 15,000 species of 

 insects to be found within fifty miles of New York City; 

 more than 2,000 of these are either moths or butterflies. 

 A book to enable the student to recognize all the insects 

 of even this limited region would have to be as large as 

 one for the birds for the whole world. The accompanying 

 diagrams may win some sympathy for entomologists and 

 at the same time indicate the inexhaustible field for study 

 offered by insects. However, only a small portion of 

 these thousands are usually noticed by the layman or, 

 outside of his speciality, by the average amateur, and 

 generally the interest is not so much in knowing the specific 

 name as in learning the general group to which the insect 

 belongs and what it does. This constitutes a general 

 knowledge of insects; to go further, in most groups, one 

 must become a specialist. This book refers, by specific 

 name, to about 1400 different kinds of insects inhabiting 

 the United States and nearly 600 of these are illustrated 

 by one or more figures. If the selections were as wisely 

 made as we hope they were, the non-specialist should be 

 able, by its aid, to recognize, at least in a general way, 



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