V. 5 



^ PREFACE 



*- 



Ten years to-day I sat writing the Preface to the first vohnne of this 



work, and the time since expended upon the subsequent vokniies has 



(/> indeed been very pleasant, yielding; much happiness of Plato's " idea eidos "; 



Or' for there are few experiences more personally pleasing than to turn wrong 



■7 into right or bring order out of chaos. Would that I could believe, with 



the Ven. William Kirby, "finis coronat opus," that the last volume 



transcended its predecessors ; but the animals here treated of are so 



elusive in their structural stability, and so protean both in their sexual 



characters and colour, that it were something to feel conviction — as 



certainly I do feel it — that they are now reduced to a more natural order 



and sequence than has hitherto been attained, especially in this country 



where the subject has heretofore attracted so little attention that, from 



ir* the days of Westwood, the most careful thinkers have discovered too few 



data on which to found biological theses upon Ichneumonidae. This 



lack of data, or rather the wide range of books and periodicals through 



which the known data were scattered, has now, I trust, been obviated by 



' the concentration I have attempted throughout the work of every pub- 



i lished or personally ascertained fact with regard to each species. All 



^ the details of distribution, life-history, and association in/er se are here ; 



; but I shall not attempt to elucidate the many fascinating problems they 



^ present in a mere Descriptive Account of indigenous insects, for in them 



•H the collector and systematist must give precedence to the biologist and 



^ philosopher; and as we, the former, have attained to Plato's ideal, so 



they, the latter, will reach on to that infinitely higher one, Aristotle's 



"intellectual happiness," reserved for so few. 



When I first attacked the subject it was with much the feeling that 

 caused Blucher to exclaim upon London, "What a city to sack"; and it 

 has indeed been decimated and rebuilt: — in 1856 but little more than 

 seven hundred species were known in Britain, in 1872 the number totalled 

 just under one thousand two hundred, and I was enabled to record one 

 thousand seven hundred and nineteen different kinds in 1901. Many 

 of these names are now proved to have been erroneously introduced and 

 the true and critical total, according to my Catalogue suflixed to this 

 volume, stands at one thousand five hundred and seventeen distinct 



r^/SOQ/2Q 



