296 BARON WALCKENAER ON THE 



spiders, Cicadw, and crickets are not produced from worms, but 

 from animals resembling the perfect insect. 



The opinions of Aristotle on the metamorphosis of insects, 

 although not entirely free from errors, are on the whole singu- 

 larly correct, and prove him to have been a most persevering 

 observer, and to have possessed a wonderful degree of skill and 

 tact in the generalization of scientific facts : at times even fore- 

 seeing discoveries which have since been made. 



We must not forget to remark, that it is in connexion with 

 the subject of the mode in which insects copulate, that Aristotle 

 mentions the Spondylus ; and the cockchaffer is the most likely 

 insect of all others to be frequently seen in the act of copu- 

 lation. 



From the passage in Pliny, and the assertion of Agricola, it 

 would seem that the Romans and the Greeks of the Lower 

 Empire used the word Spondylus to designate the larva of that 

 large species of cockchaffer of whose metamorphoses we are 

 ignoi'ant. 



Though there can be no doubt that the Latins as well as the 

 Greeks were acquainted with an insect so generally distributed 

 as the cockchafTer, and which does so much mischief to 

 agriculturists, even in the perfect state eating the leaves of 

 plants and trees ; we do not know whether the Romans gave a 

 specific name to this insect, or designated it by the general 

 denomination, ScarabcBus, or Cantharis, words thus so often 

 made use of for all kinds of Coleoptera. 



Fabricius, who separated the cockchafTers from the genus 

 Scarabwus, Linn., gave the name Melolontha to the genus to 

 which they belong ; a word employed by the Swedish naturalist 

 for the specific name of the commonest species. This word is 

 taken from Aristotle, who uses it, as well as Cantharis and 

 Carabiis, for several kinds of beetles, which in our natural 

 systems belong to widely diflferent genera, and even families. 

 It is in conformity with the opinion of the learned in the time 

 of Aldrovandus,'' — an opinion adopted by Bochart,^ — that 

 Linnaeus makes the Melolontha of Aristotle, and our common 

 cockchafTer, the same insect ; but, as Latreille f has well ob- 

 served, a comparison of certain passages in Suidas, Pollux, 



** Aldrovandus, de An. Insect., p. 17. * Boch. Hier., pt. ii. lib. iv, c. 2. 



^ See Latreille's memoir on the insects painted or sculptured on ancient Egyp- 

 tian monuments, in the Memoirei sur divers Sujets, bvo. 



