PREFACE. 
Durine a recent tour through Italy I first conceived a predilection for the study of entomology. 
Early in the Italian spring, in the months of March and April, after a winter’s residence in Rome, my 
favourite rambles were over the desert yet beautiful Campagna; and in these walks my attention was 
actively aroused by the profusion and variety of insect life, particularly of glittering butterflies, that 
in those early months already flitted over the flowery waste. As I stepped among tufts of the Alpine 
anemony, the crimson cyclamen, or purple squill, crowds of painted insects arose at every tread, as 
though a passing gust of wind had suddenly scattered a cloud of the many-coloured petals of the 
crushed flowers to the breeze. Later in the season the numbers still inereased, and their brilliancy and 
novelty soon determined me to attempt the formation of a collection, reserving the classification and 
study till my return home; when I discovered that many beautiful species of Lepidoptera which I had 
deemed novelties were well known as indigenous to our own island: where, however, their com- 
paratively unfrequent appearance had not forced them into notice, whilst in Italy their profusion had 
compelled attention. Such was the case with Papilio Machaon (the swallow-tail butterfly) as common 
on the Roman Campagna as the eabbage-white in our gardens. Mancipium Daplidice (the Bath white) 
and Pieris Crateegi (the black-veined white) were still more numerous; whilst the whole Campagna 
about mid-day received quite a golden hue from the rich orange colours of Goniapteryx Cleopatra and 
Colias Edusa, both of which were in such profusion that I actually took above twenty specimens of the 
latter species at once, upon a gigantic thistle on the road to Tivoli. 
Upon my return to England I found the arrangement and description of my collection not so easy a 
matter as I had anticipated, for want of some popular yet comprehensive and complete work upon the 
subject ; and I was only eventually enabled to make myself acquainted with even the British species 
in their different stages by reference to expensive foreign works. Feeling thus the want of some 
popular work in which the transformations of British Lepidoptera were accurately described and 
developed, with accurate portraits of each insect in its three great stages—* the caterpillar, the 
chrysalis, and the butterfly or moth, I planned the present work with the view of supplying the 
deficiency I had so much felt myself: not confining myself to Lepidoptera but extending the plan to all 
British insects, many of whose transformations are perhaps even more wonderful than those of 

* Several works exist which are nearly complete with reference to the imago or complete insect, but none representing all the British species 
in the three stages of larva, pupa, and imago ; the figures in Stephens, Curtis, or Donovan, being only selections. 
B 
