1£k Mr. Broderip on the importance of Facts 



the North.* If, after these records, any one should he disposed 

 to sneer at communications such as those, the utility of which I 

 am attempting to advocate, I would say to that man, " if such a 

 man there be" — Read the excellent chapters on the direct and in- 

 direct injuries caused by insects, in that storehouse of entomolo- 

 gical knowledge the '' Introduction," as it is modestly called, 

 of Kirby and Spence j — watch the flight of the Locust and the 

 Hessian Fly, with plenty before them, and famine in their rear ; — 

 take, I say, these two plagues alone out of scores of others, and 

 then declare whether a knowledge of their habits, which might 

 teach us to prevent the yisitation or stop it in its course, is to be 

 despised. 



But there is yet another view of the subject, which a knowledge 

 of the habits of animals most strongly illuminates ; a view which 

 ■will never be deemed unworthy of the attention of philosophical 

 minds. An enquiry into the proper place which different forms 

 hold in the scale of animated beings, can never be prosecuted 

 •with success without the aid of light derived from the observations 

 of practical Zoologists. 



Few have turned their thoughts to the minutiae of animal 

 habits with such devoted attention as distinguished the late ami- 

 able author of " The Natural History of Selborne ; " few have 

 watched nature with greater humility and accuracy ; and none 

 have recorded their observations in a more perfect style of classi- 

 cal simplicity. He did not think it beneath the dignity of a 

 scholar and divine to be the historian of the habits of the meanest 



will be formed of the immense swarms of these destructive animals that infest 

 this island, from the fact that, on a single plantation, thirty thousand were 

 destroyed in one year. Traps of various kinds are set to catch them, poison is 

 resorted to, and terriers and sometimes ferrets are employed, to explore their 

 haunts and root them out ; still however their numbers remain undiminished, 

 as far at least as can be judged from the ravages they commit. They are of a 

 much larger size than the European rat, especially that kind of them called by 

 the negroes racoons. On the experiment being tried of putting one of these and 

 a cat together, the latter declined attacking it." — Stewart's Jamaica^ page 57, 

 et seq:* 



* See the valuable papers on Scolytus destructor and Hylohius Abietis^ by 

 W. S. MacLeay, Esq. the first in the 11th vol. of the Edinburgh Philosophical 

 Journal j the second in the first vol. of this Journal. 



