391 



We might also refer to the economy and habits of many insects, 

 of those especially living in societies, which taken in connection 

 with the low development of their nervous system, have no parallel 

 in the rest of the animal world. 



But no adequate study can be made of the remarkable peculiari- 

 ties of the insect race, except where the observer is long stationary 

 in a given locality, and content patiently to watch and record what 

 comes under his eye from season to season, while confining his 

 attention, for a time at least, to some particular genus or family. 

 The life-long history of even a single species will throw more light 

 upon our reasonings about development, and do more for the 

 science of entomology than the most extensive collection, in which 

 every insect in the district finds a place without more being known 

 about it than when and where it was taken. Many active workers 

 in this desired way are already in the field, and what sort of work 

 they are doing may be gathered from the papers they have published 

 in the Transactions of different Natural History Societies. There 

 ought to be similar workers wherever there exists a Natural History 

 Field Club. 



We have a praiseworthy instance in one of our most distinguished 

 entomologists, Sir John Lubbock, who has devoted much of his 

 valuable time to the study of some of the obscurer forms of insect 

 life, in connection with biological questions of the deepest philoso- 

 phical import. It is perhaps by the study of the lower forms of 

 animals generally that we shall arrive at any sure knowledge of 

 the laws of development in the higher forms. But it is especially 

 so in the class of insects, where the departures from a given type 

 of structure are much more marked and diverse than among the 

 vertebrate animals, not merely when we compare together orders 

 and families, but when we compare the different stages of develop- 

 ment in the same species. 



In a series of papers in the Linnean Transactions commenced 

 some years back. Sir John Lubbock has given a detailed account of 

 the Thysamira of Latreille, a group of very small wingless insects 

 found in woods and other damp places, low down in the scale of 

 insect life, undergoing no well marked metamorphosis, and by some 

 entomologists hardly accounted as true insects, a group to which few 



