Chapter III 

 THE CLASSIFICATION OF INSECTS 



What is it? A learned man 



Could give it a clumsy name. 



Let him name it who can, 



Its beauty would be the same. — Tennyson. 



I believe that community of descent is the bond which is par- 

 tially revealed to us by our classifications. — Darwin. 



Objects of Systematic Zoology. — The studies 

 summarised in the two preceding chapters are due to 

 the labours of men who have devoted their attention 

 to learning the detailed structure of a comparatively 

 small number of typical insects, or to tracing carefully 

 the life-history of a few kinds. Besides students of 

 animals from these points of view — morphologists 

 and biologists as they are called — there are many 

 naturalists who spend their time in a necessarily more 

 superficial study of a larger number of animals, with 

 the object of discovering how many different kinds 

 there are, giving distinctive names to these different 

 kinds, and arranging them in groups which shall 

 express the varying degrees of their likeness or 

 dissimilarity. These workers are the systematic 

 zoologists, and the object of their work is to classify 

 the different kinds of animals in such a way as shall 

 express their relationships. For, as stated in the 

 opening pages of this book, all naturalists work in the 

 belief that animals are really related to each other, 

 representing branches more or less divergent from a 



