528 EXTERNAL ANATOMY OF INSECTS. 
without great reluctance, and the fullest conviction of the 
absolute necessity of some change; but as the standard 
of language in our science is still unsettled, and different 
terms are used by different writers, there seems full li- 
berty left to me to select those that appear upon the 
whole most appropriate; and where proper and signifi- 
cant terms seem wanting, to invent new ones. M. La- 
treille, in alate Essay?, has proposed many changes of 
this kind, and seems to hesitate concerning the adoption 
of some of those recently coined in France for the parts 
of the trunk>; it may therefore, I think, be permitted 
me to labour a little in this hitherto imperfectly cultured 
field, and to suggest such improvements as the subject 
may seem to require or admit. 
Linné called the part we are now considering the 
trunk, its upper-side he usuaily denominated the thorax, 
and its under-side the breast: he notices also the scutel- 
lum and sternum’. As the prothorax and scutellum are 
the only apparent parts of the back of the trunk in his 
first Orders (Coleoptera, Hemiptera), the rest being co- 
vered, in noticing these he puts the part for the whole, 
calling the prothorax the thorax, but which strictly was 
not synonymous with what he called by the same name 
in the other Orders. Linné’s phraseology with regard 
to the trunk of insects was adopted by Fabricius and 
other Entomologists, till Illiger employed the term ¢ho- 
rax to designate the whole of the trunk4, calling the 
® Organisation Extérieure des Insectes, Mém. du Mus. ¢. viii. 
> Ibid. 199—. I have never been able to procure M. Audoin’s 
Mémoire on this subject. 
© Fundament. Entomolog. in Amen. Acad. vii. 143. 
* Terminologie, 1578, &c. He afterwards called the trunk Stethi- 
dium: Terminologie der Insekten. Magaz. 1806. 14. - 
