20 INSECTS OF MASSACHUSETTS. 



weevils a short, appropriate, significant, and purely English name 

 would be very difficult, if not impossible, and there would be 

 great danger of overburdening the memory with such a number of 

 names ; but, by means of the ingenious and simple method of 

 nomenclature invented by Linnaeus, these weevils are all arranged 

 under three hundred and fifty-five generical, or sir names, requir- 

 ing in addition, only a small number of different words, like 

 christian names, to indicate the various species or kinds. There 

 is oftentimes a great convenience in the use of single collective 

 terms for groups of animals and plants, whereby the necessity for 

 enumerating all the individual contents or the characteristics of 

 these groups is avoided. Thus the single word Ruminantia 

 stands for camels, lamas, giraffes, deer, antilopes, goats, sheep, 

 and kine, or for all the hoofed quadrupeds, which ruminate or 

 chew the cud, and have no front teeth in the upper jaw ; Lepi- 

 doptera includes all the various kinds of butterflies, hawk-moths, 

 and millers or moths, or insects having wings covered with 

 branny scales, and a spiral tongue instead of jaws, and whose 

 young appear in the form of caterpillars. It would be diffi- 

 cult to find or invent any single English words, which would 

 be at once so convenient and so expressive. This, therefore, is 

 an additional reason why scientific names ought to be preferred to 

 all others, at least in works of natural history, where it is highly 

 important that the objects described should have names that are 

 short, significant in themselves, and not liable to be mistaken or 

 misapplied. There is no art, profession, trade, or occupation, 

 which can be taught or learned without the use of technical 

 words or phrases belonging to each, and which, to the inexperi- 

 enced and untaught, are as unintelligible as the terms of science. 

 It is not at all more difficult to learn and remember the latter 

 than the former, when the attention has been properly given to 

 the subject. The seaman, the farmer, and the mechanic soon 

 become familiar with the names and phrases peculiar to their 

 several callings, uncouth, and without apparent signification, as 

 many of them are. So too the terms of science lose their for- 

 bidding and mysterious appearance and sound by the frequency 

 of their recurrence, and finally become as harmonious to the ear, 

 as they are clear and definite in their application. 



