Xl INTRODUCTION. 



referred to " un Hymenoptere parasite et fouisseur." Indeed, the proto- 

 type of our insects, which was the Ichneumon or Mongoose ( Herpestes 

 ichneumon ) of Barbary, Egypt and the Cape of Good Hope, appears to 

 have represented hoth tliese conditions, though I never heard of an insect 

 whicli did so ! This mammal was reverenced by the natives for its utihty 

 in depositing its young in tlie intestines of, and for hving internally upon, 

 the crocodile, as do our parasites u[)on other insects. It is also represented 

 as digging up, like the fossors, and devouring, its host's eggs, as well as 

 attacking its young ; and Dallas ^ goes so far as to state that it destroyed 

 the crocodile itself. 



It will be interesting to here lightly touch upon the quaint olden works, 

 treating in part of the Ichneumonidae, which ap[)eared during the earliest 

 stages of their study. In 1623, Ulysses Androvandus noticed, in his I)e 

 Animalibus Insectis, that small fly-like animals were sometimes substituted 

 for butterflies, on emerging from their pupae, and that caterpillars laid eggs, 

 like a grain of wheat, each of which contained a worm; and, in 1634, 

 Moufet, who seems to know nothing of their economy, describes several 

 " Musca tripilia"— so named from the three-pieced terebra — which may, 

 from his figures, be referred to the Ichneumonidae. Goedart's four works, 

 which appeared from 1662 to 1700, show that the author, a careful observer 

 of metamorphoses, bred several parasites, which he describes and figures, 

 from Lepidoptera. It was Svvammerdam, in 1669, who first excluded 

 the spiders from the middle of the Insecta, and gave rise to the title 

 Vespae-Ichneumones, which, however, embraced the Fossores and not the 

 Ichneumons of to-day. A study of Ray's History of Insects'^ shows very 

 plainly what an intelligent man can do in the way of original work, and 

 illustrates how little our views really have advanced in the last two hundred 

 years. In it we find that (roughly speaking) his Gregaria = Aculeata, 

 of which Mellifica = the Anthophila, Apis-Mansueta constituting the 

 Andrenidae, &c., and Bombylius the Apidae ; Non-Mellifica = the Fossores 

 and Diploptera, divided into Crabrones and Vespae. His Solitaria or 

 Non-gregaria = Terebrantia, of which Apiformia and Vespiformia are part ; 

 the latter he divides into Muscae-Vespiformes = Sessiliventres, and Vespae- 

 Ichneumones = Pupivora, Majores and Minores. Consequently these 

 latter, which he noticed bury their eggs in the bodies of caterpillars, 

 are the true Parasitica as we know them to-day. Ray's error of group- 

 ing certain neuropterous genera under the Hymenoptera {Tetraptera or 

 Quadripennia, as he calls them), when one considers the heterogeneous 

 forms still included under the former broad Order, is not so heinous as it 

 at first sight appears. 



Albin and Frisch were the first to describe new Ichneumons in the 

 eighteenth century, and the latter appears to have first set forth and named, 

 in his Beschreibung von allerley Insecten in Teutschland, the exoskeleton, 

 more es[)ecially the cribrary organs and neuration. Gravcnhorst's comment 

 on his computation of the nuniber of species is amusing ; the latter adds, 

 exultingly, " Bone Frischi, cpiid hodie diceres ! " ; and we might, now-a- 

 days, venture a /// qitoque."^ The seven volumes of Reaumur's Memoires, 

 which appeared 1734-42 and laid a very firm foundation to the study 

 of the economy of the Ichneumonidae, are even to-day often quoted as 



1 Klements of HntonioloKV, V*. 239. 



•i Histoiia Insectorum. Johannes Rains. Londini. lyin. (Posthnmoiis). 



3 Gravenhorst described about 1,630 species ; Marsliall's present computation is 710,000 species ! 



