194 FATUEAL HISTOET OF 



her the labours requisite for the preservation of their 

 race, it is not surprising that the Egyptians, at a 

 period when such erroneous notions prevailed re- 

 garding the generation of the lower animals, should 

 have imagined that there was only one sex, and that 

 they should have preferred to consider it as the 

 one which has most privileges attached to it, or, 

 as grammarians call it, the more worthy gender. 

 Admitting the doctrine of spontaneous generation, 

 it was necessary, according to their principles, that 

 the insects should disinter their balls and bring them 

 into contact with water, as that element was conceiv- 

 ed to produce, with the concurrence of heat, all 

 those animals that were without living progenitors.* 

 In more recent times the industrious habits of 

 these little insects appear sometimes to have ex- 

 cited nearly as much admiration as they did in 

 Egypt. In the earliest entomological work pub- 

 lished in Britain,-]- remarkable for the extent of 

 its cumbrous erudition, the species of which we 

 speak, or another closely allied to it, forms one of 

 an extensive series of figures, a few of which bear 

 some resemblance to the objects they are designed 

 to represent, and several folio pages are devoted to 



* See an interesting memoir by Latreille, in the Ann: 

 du Mus. for 1819, entitled Des Insectes prints ou sculptes sur 

 les monuments antiques de VEgypte. 



•f- Moufeti Insectorum sive minimorum animalium 

 Theatrum, London, 1634. 



