CHAPTER III 
THE CLASSIFICATION OF BUTTERFLIES 
“ Winged flowers, or flying gems.” 
* Moore. 
At the base of all truly scientific knowledge lies the principle 
of order. There have been some who have gone so far as to say 
that science is merely the orderly arrangement of facts. While 
such a definition is defective, it is nevertheless true that no real 
knowledge of any branch of science is attained until its relation¬ 
ship to other branches of human knowledge is learned, and until 
a classification of the facts of which it treats has been made. 
When a science treats of things, it is necessary that these things 
should become the subject of investigation, until at last their re¬ 
lation to one another, and the whole class of things to which they 
belong, has been discovered. Men who devote themselves to 
the discovery of the relation of things and to their orderly clas¬ 
sification are known as systematists. 
The great leader in this work was the immortal Linnaeus, the 
“Father of Natural History,” as he has been called. Upon the 
foundation laid by him in his work entitled “Systema Naturae,” 
or “ The System of Nature,” all who have followed after him have 
labored, and the result has been the rise of the great modern sci¬ 
ences of botany and zoology, which treat respectively of the 
vegetable and animal kingdoms. 
The Place of Butterflies in the Animal Kingdom .—The animal 
kingdom, for purposes of classification, has been subdivided into 
various groups known as subkingdoms. One of these subking¬ 
doms contains those animals which, being without vertebrae, or 
an internal skeleton, have an external skeleton, composed of a 
series of horny rings, attached to which are various organs. This 
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