INTRODUCTION 
CHAPTER I 
THE LIFE-HISTORY AND ANATOMY OF MOTHS 
4 1 suppose you are an entomologist ? ” 
“Not quite so ambitious as that, sir. I should like to put my eyes on the 
individual entitled to that name. No man can be truly called an entomologist, 
sir; the subject is too vast for any single human intelligence to grasp.” 
Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Poet at the Breakfast Table. 
The great order of the scale-winged insects, or lepidoptera, 
by the consent of almost all naturalists has been subdivided into 
two suborders, the Rhopalocera , or Butterflies, and the Hetero¬ 
cera , or Moths. As Dr. David Sharp well says, “The only 
definition that can be given of Heterocera is the practical one that 
all Lepidoptera that are not butterflies are Heterocera.”* 
The distinction made between butterflies and moths, accord¬ 
ing to which all lepidoptera having clubbed antennae are to be 
classified as Rhopalocera, or butterflies, and those without 
clubbed antennae are to be classified as Heterocera, or moths, 
while holding good in the main, yet is found with the increase 
of our knowledge to have exceptions, and there are a few fami¬ 
lies of lepidoptera, apparently forming con¬ 
necting links between the butterflies and the 
moths, in which, while most of the structural 
characteristics are those of the Heterocera, the 
antennae are distinctly clubbed. This is true 
of the Castniidce, found in tropical America, Fig. i .— Dahlia 
the Neocastniidce of the Indo-Malayan region, stecherT ^ Pagen ~ 
the Euschemonidce of Australia, and certain 
obscure genera of the Agaristidce , among them that remarkable 
insect, Dahlia hesperioides Pagenstecher, which occurs in the 
^Cambridge Natural History, Vol. VI. p. 366. 
N.J.H 
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