40 INTRODUCTORY LETTER. 



treasures will still continue to enrich your cabinet. If you leave your 

 own vicinity for an entomological excursion, your prospects of success are 

 still further increased ; and even if confined in bad weather to your inn, 

 the windows of your apartment, as I have often experienced, will add to 

 your stock. If a sudden shower obliges you at any time to seek shelter 

 under a tree, your attention will be attracted, and the tedium of your sta- 

 tion relieved, where the botanist could not hope to find even a new lichen 

 or moss, by the appearance of several insects, driven there perhaps by the 

 same cause as yourself, that you have not observed before. But should 

 you, as I trust you will, feel a desire to attend to the manners and econ- 

 omy of insects, and become ambitious of making discoveries in this part 

 of entomological science, I can assure you, from long experience, that you 

 will here find an inexhaustable fund of novelty. For more than twenty 

 years my attention has been directed to them, and during most of my 

 summer walks my eyes have been employed in observing their ways ; yet 

 I can say with truth, that so far from having exhausted the subject, within 

 the last six months I have witnessed more interesting facts respecting their 

 history than in many preceding years. To follow only the insects that 

 frequent your own garden, from their first to their last state, and to trace 

 all their proceedings, would supply an interesting amusement for the 

 remainder of your life, and at its close you would leave much to be done 

 by your successor ; for where we know thoroughly the iiistory of one 

 insect, there are hundreds concerning which we have ascertained little 

 besides the bare fact of their existence. 



But numerous other sources -of pleasure and information will open them- 

 selves to you, not inferior to what any other science can furnish, when you 

 enter more deeply into the study. Insects, indeed, appear to have been 

 nature's favorite productions, in which, to manifest her power and skill, 

 she has combined and concentrated almost all that is either beautiful and 

 graceful, interesting and alluring, or curious and singular, in every other 

 class and order of her children. To these, her valued miniatures, she has 

 given the most delicate touch and highest finish of her pencil. Numbers 

 she has armed with glittering mail, which reflects a lustre like that of bur- 

 nished metals^ ; in others she lights up the dazzling radiance of polished 

 gems.^ Some she has decked with what looks like liquid drops, or plates 

 of gold and silver^ ; or with scales or pile, which mimic the color and 

 emit the ray of the same precious metals.'* Some exhibit a rude exterior, 

 like stones in their native stated while others represent their smooth and 

 shining face after they have been submitted to the tool of the polisher : 

 others, again, like so many pigmy Atlases bearing on their backs a micro- 

 cosm, by the rugged and various elevations and depressions of their 

 tuberculated crust, present to the eye of the beholder no unapt imitation 

 of the unequal surface of the earth, now horrid with misshapen rocks, 

 ridges, and precipices — now swelling into hills and mountains, and now 



' The genera Eumolpus, Lamprima, Rynchites. 



2 Cryptnrhynchm corn/scans. Germar {Insect. Spec. Nov. i. 216.) regards this insect as 

 >ynonyinous with Illiger's Eurhimis cupratus, the description of which I had not seen when 

 the Century of Insects {Linn. Trans, xii.) was written, nor am I able now to speak de- 

 cisively on the subject. — K. 



3 Erycina Cupido, Argynnis Fassifiorce, Lathonia, &c. 



* Pepsis fiiscipcnnis, argentata, kc. * The species of the genus Trox. 



