PREFACE. xl 



institute a rigorous revision of the terms employed, making such 

 additions and improvements as might seem to be called for ; and 

 to attempt a more complete and collected account of the existing 

 discoveries respecting the anatomical and physiological departments 

 of the science than has yet been given to the world ; — and to these 

 two points their plan at the outset was limited. 



It soon, however, occurred to them, that it would be of little 

 use to write a book which no one .would peruse ; and that, in the 

 present age of love for light reading, there could not be much hope 

 of leading students to the dry abstractions of the science, unless 

 they were conducted through the attractive portal of the economy 

 and natural histoiy of its objects. To this department, therefore, 

 they resolved to devote the first and most considerable portion of 

 their intended work, bringing into one point of view, under dis- 

 tinct heads, the most interesting discoveries of Reaumur, De Geer, 

 Bonnet, Lyonet, the Hubers, &c., as well as their own individual 

 observations, relative to the noxious and beneficial properties of 

 insects, their aff'ection for their young, their food, and modes of 

 obtaining it, their habitations, societies, &c. &c. ; and they were 

 the more induced to adopt this plan from the consideration that, 

 though many of the most striking of these facts have been before 

 presented to the English reader, a great proportion are unknown 

 to him ; and that no similar generalisation (if a slight attempt to- 

 wards it in Sraellie's Philosophy of Natural History, and a confes- 

 sedly imperfect one in Latreille's Histoire Naturclle des Crustaces 

 et des Insectes be excepted) has ever been attempted in any lan- 

 guage. Thus the entire work would be strictly on the plan of the 

 Philosophia Entomologica of Fabricius, only giving a much greater 

 extent to the (Ecoiiomia and Usus, and adverting to these in the 

 first place instead of in the last. 



The epistolary form was adopted, not certainly from any idea of 

 their style being particularly suited to a mode of writing so diffi- 

 cult to keep from running into incongruities, but simply because 

 this form admitted of digressions and allusions called for in a 

 popular work, but which might have seemed misplaced In a stricter 

 kind of composition ; — because it is better suited to convey those 

 practical directions which in some branches of the pursuit the 

 student requires ; — and, lastly, because by this form the objection 



