66 



LEFEBVRE ON MANTIS. 



removing them ; we have always wished them a better employ- 

 ment. Let Teme flow on in all its beauty — in all its crystal 

 clearness. Oh that we were now a tenant of that little house 

 above its fall, listening to the eternal hum of waters ! Oh that 

 our eyes beheld that beauteous valley, and all its orchards ! 

 Oh that we could now sweep with our net the rich grass 

 along those meadows ere it yields to the unrelenting scythe ! 

 Oh that we could wade, with naked feet, adown its bed, and 

 dwell with delight on those curious tracks over which our 

 friend Allies theorises so beautifully, but in vain ! 



Art. V. — New Group of Orthoptera, Family of Mantides. 

 By M. A. Lefebvre. {Extracted from the Annales de la 

 Societe Entomologique de France.) 



The Mantides present forms and exterior anatomical dis- 

 tinctions so marked, that we can no longer leave them con- 

 nected as they have remained for some years past. Illiger, 

 sensible of the necessity of dividing the genus, was the first to 

 separate, under the name of Empiisu, those in which the head 

 terminates in an elongated point, and the males are dis- 

 tinguished by pectinated antennae. But he still left in the 

 genus Mantis species as dissimilar, and capable of forming 

 groups as distinct, as the one he had himself created. 



Lichenstein was of essential service in describing a portion 

 of the species figured by Stoll, and more especially in pointing 

 out well-ascertained distinctions ; but, in the monograph he 

 published in the 6th vol. of the Transactions of the Linnaean 

 Society of London, he proposed no arrangement of genera ; 

 and Latreille, in the second edition of his Families Natu- 

 relles, did not think proper to establish one, although the 

 generic history of these insects demanded the closest attention 

 of his master mind. At length M. Audinet-Serville, in his 

 Revue Methodique des Orthopteres, published in the 22d 

 vol. of the Annales des Sciences Naturelles, rescued this 

 family from the chaos in which it had been so long buried ; 

 and from the external organic characters, — taking sometimes 

 the foliaceous membranes observable on the legs of certain 

 species, sometimes the elongation of the head, the swelling 



