IV PREFACE. 



numerous occupations did not allow him to superintend this portion 

 of his treatise on animals. 



Perhaps the desire of associating my name with his in a work like 

 this, which, by the multitude of researches on which it rests, and by 

 their application, has become a precious literary monument of the 

 age, has deceived me, and thrown me into an enterprize beyond my 

 powers to accomplish. The responsibility is great, and I have im- 

 posed upon myself a task, in which the boldness of the plan is only 

 equalled by the difficulty of its execution. To unite within a very 

 limited space the most interesting facts in the history of Insects, to 

 arrange them with precision and clearness in a natural series, to pour- 

 tray with a bold pencil the physiognomy of these animals, trace their 

 distinguishing characters with truth and brevity, in a way propor- 

 tioned to the successive progress of the science and that of the pupil, 

 to indicate useful or noxious species, and those whose mode of life 

 interests our curiosity, to point out the best sources from which the 

 knowledge of others may be obtained, to restore to Entomology the 

 amiable simplicity which it possessed in the days of Linnaeus, Geoffroy, 

 and of the early writings of Fabricius, but still to present it as it now 

 is, or with all the wealth of observation it has since acquired, yet 

 without overloading it; in a word, to conform to the model before 

 me, the work of M. Cuvier, is the end I have striven to attain. 



This savant, in his " Tableau Elementaire de 1'Histoire Naturelle 

 des Animaux," did not restrict the extent given by Linnaeus to his 

 class of Insects; he however made some necessary ameliorations, 

 which have since served as the foundation of other systems. He dis- 

 tinguishes Insects, in the first place, from other invertebrate animals, 

 by much more rigorous characters than those previously employed 

 viz., a knotted medullary spinal marrow, and articulated limbs. 

 Linnaeus terminates his class of Insects with those which are apterous, 

 although most of them, such as the Crustacea and the Araneides, 

 with respect to their organization, are the most perfect of their class, 

 or are the most closely approximated to the Mollusca. His method, 

 in this respect, is then exactly the inverse of the natural system, and, 

 by transporting the Crustacea to the head of the class, and by placing 

 almost all the Aptera of Linnaeus directly after them, Cuvier rectified 

 the method in a point where the series was in direct opposition to the 

 scale formed by Nature. 



In his Lemons d'Anatomie Comparee, the class of Insects, from 

 which he now separates the Crustacea, is divided into nine orders, 

 founded on the nature and functions of the organs of mariducation, 

 the presence or absence of wings, their number, consistence, and the 



