Insects : Introduction 141 



South of Cambridge are some productive reed-beds in the 

 valley of the upper Cam and its tributaries. 



Thus it will be seen that, although the whole of the northern 

 part of the county is Fen land, in the south it is varied with 

 a lot of wooded country west of Cambridge, woods and heaths 

 in the extreme west, chalk hills in the south and south-east, 

 and the narrow strip of "Breck sand" above Newmarket. 



Apart from the LEPIDOPTERA very little is known about 

 the insects of the county; several orders have been collected 

 to some extent at Wicken and Chippenham, but very little 

 else has been done, or at any rate recorded. The late Rev. 

 L. Jenyns (afterwards Blomefield), who lived at Bottisham in 

 the early half .of last century, left to the Cambridge Philo- 

 sophical Society a manuscript catalogue of the insects of 

 Cambridgeshire, together with his collections of insects, which 

 include the actual specimens referred to in the catalogue, 

 except in the case of the species whose records were supplied 

 to him by other workers. This catalogue has been largely 

 drawn upon for the following articles, and in some orders, 

 such as ORTHOPTERA, NEUROPTERA, HYMENOPTERA, and HEMI- 

 PTERA, it forms almost the whole available material. With 

 the exception of scattered records in the various Ento- 

 mological Magazines, the only published matter appears to be 

 the list of "Lepidoptera of the Fens" in Fenland Past and 

 Present, 1878; this list is valuable as it includes the records 

 of Lord Walsingham and Mr Wm Warren and, more important 

 still, of the late Mr F. Bond and Mr A. Thurnall. In addition 

 to the Jenyns collection in the museum there is that of the 

 late Prof. Babington, which is especially rich in COLEOPTERA, 

 and another large collection of local LEPIDOPTERA which con- 

 tains long series of all the extinct Fen species. 



Of the following articles and lists, those on ORTHOPTERA, 

 NEUROPTERA, HEMIPTERA, and DIPTERA are copies of those 

 prepared for the forthcoming Volume on Cambridgeshire, of 

 the Victoria County History, and are here inserted by the 

 courtesy of the Editors of that work. 



