18 INSECTS INJURIOUS TO VEGETATION. 



all well-educated persons in all parts of the world ; while the 

 common names of animals and plants in our own and other 

 modern languages are very limited in their application, and 

 moreover are often misapplied. For example, the name weevil 

 is given, in this country, to at least six different kinds of in- 

 sects, two of which are moths, two are flies, and two are 

 beetles. Moreover, since nearly four thousand species of 

 weevils have actually been scientifically named and described, 

 when mention is made of "the weevil," it may well be a sub- 

 ject of doubt to which of these four thousand species the 

 speaker or writer intends to refer; whereas, if the scientific 

 name of the species in question were made known, this doubt 

 would at once be removed. To give to each of these weevils a 

 short, appropriate, significant, and purely English name, would 

 be very difficult, if not impossible, and there would be great 

 danger of overburdening the memory with such a number of 

 names; but, by means of the ingenious and simple method of 

 nomenclatiu'e invented by Linnaeus, these weevils are all 

 arranged under three hundred and fifty-five generical, or sur- 

 names, requiring in addition only a small number of different 

 words, like christian names, to indicate the various species or 

 kinds. There is oftentimes a great convenience in the use of 

 single collective terms for groups of animals and plants, whereby 

 the necessity for enumerating all the individual contents or the 

 characteristics of these groups is avoided. Thus the single 

 word Rumhmntia stands for camels, lamas, giraffes, deer, ante- 

 lopes, goats, sheep, and kine, or for all the hoofed quadrupeds, 

 which ruminate or chew the cud, and have no front teeth in 

 the upper jaw; Lepidopter a ii\c\vide.s all the various kinds of 

 butterflies, hawk-moths, and millers or moths, or insects having 

 wings covered with branny scales, and a spiral tongue instead 

 of jaws, and whose young appear in the form of caterpillars. 

 It would be difficult to find or invent any single English words 

 which would be at once so convenient and so expressive. 

 This, therefore, is an additional reason why scientific names 

 ought to be preferred to all others, at least in works of natural 

 history, where it is highly important that the objects described 

 should have names that are short, significant in themselves, 



