46 THE entomologist's record. 



of these pages that does not bear convincing and startling proof that the 

 author has no real practical acquaintance with the subject of which he 

 treats. Old and obsolete explanations, which have been copied and re-copied 

 by various authors of so-called popular entomological works until the 

 very name of " popular entomology " has been made to stink in the 

 nostrils of all practical and observant men, are again dished up here in 

 the old, old forms ; and, although there are no quotation marks in the 

 l)Ook, anyone who read in his childhood's days Coleman's British 

 Butterflies, Rev. J. G. Wood's Common British Moths, Newman's British 

 Butterflies and Merrin's LepidopterisVs Calendar, will recognise old 

 friends (and often deceitful and misleading enemies), in the contents of 

 this volume. Who, for example, does not recognise the following : — 

 " The framework that supports the thin membrane we have spoken of 

 as consisting of a system of rays, but to these the terms, veins, nerves, 

 nervures or nervules, are more commonly applied by various naturalists. 

 We cannot do better, however, than adhere to the name originally used, 

 for the structures in question do not perform the functions of veins, 

 though, at first, they contain blood ?" This will be read with interest 

 by entomologists who have long learned to look upon the nervures as 

 trachese, outside and around which the blood circulates. We would refer 

 the QMtiiOx to Ent. Becord, vol. ii., pp. 101-104, 153 and 274, for an 

 explanation of what a nervure really is. The structure of an insect's 

 eye is the subject of a discourse, wholly (from a scientific point of view) 

 imaginative. The author says that the *' sense of vision depends on 

 other conditions besides the size of the eye, and as these conditions are 

 not understood in relation to the eyes of insects, any attempt at an ex- 

 planation would be quite useless." Concerning this again we would 

 refer our author to Dr. Sharp's article on the eyes and vision of Arthro- 

 pods, in a recent volume of the Transactions of the Entomological Society of 

 London, where he will find that the conditions are better understood than 

 he imagines. There is also a remarkable comparison between our own 

 sense of sight and that of insects. After having supposed that each 

 facet forms a distinct image, the whole of which are " blended together 

 to form one continuous picture," the author goes on, " Still there remains 

 this difference : while in our own case the two images formed by the two 

 eyes are practically the same, in the case of insects, every one of the 

 little conical tubes of a compound eye forms an image of an object that can- 

 not possibly be formed by any one of the others." Here, even the ele- 

 mentary principle of the theory of vision is wrong, for the images 

 formed separately by our eyes, differ as essentially as would the picture 

 on each facet of an insect's eye ; but even this theory of vision in insects has 

 long been discarded by scientific entomologists. Mr. Furneaux leads 

 one to believe wonderful things concerning the power of vision in a 

 butterfly, for, after graphically describing how he has unsuccessfully 

 " quietly circled round one to approach it from behind," he concludes 

 that the cause of his failure was that " the position and construction of 

 its eyes enabled it to see almost all ways at once." These are only 

 samples of the erroneous and misleading statements that one finds in 

 every page, and about every organ touched upon. The life and death 

 scene of a butterfly, depicted on pp. 12-13, would be more interesting 

 if it were generally true. In ver}' many cases the female does not 

 " deposit her eggs on the leaves or stems of the plant a few days after 

 emergence from the chrysalis case," but leaves the operation for weeks 



