INSECTS. 213 



CLASS IX. INSECTS. (Insecta.) 



Articulated Animals with six legs, respiring by means of tra- 

 cheae ; head distinct from the thorax ; two antennae. 



THE branch of science named Entomology, (from svropov, an 

 insect, and Xoyos, a discourse,) including the most numerous class 

 of organized beings, has but lately risen to its merited conse- 

 quence. The use of insects, indeed, in the economy of nature, 

 was not likely to be estimated by men in the infancy of society, 

 to whose wants or conveniences they were apparently little cal- 

 culated to afford any addition. To some tribes, however, at- 

 tention must have been early directed on account of the ravages 

 their united myriads enabled them to perpetrate; and others 

 were early noticed as the industrious collectors of a species of 

 food which man has long converted to his use. Excepting, how- 

 ever, the observations of Aristotle, who describes their general 

 structure with great accuracy in his History of Animals, and 

 the compilation of Pliny, in the eleventh Book of his Natural 

 History, little beyond incidental notices of the habits or the 

 uses of a few of the more common insects occur among the ear- 

 lier writers ; and even till very lately the limits of the class 

 were but imperfectly ascertained. The term Insecta is derived 

 from the Latin in, into, and seco, I cut, from the body having 

 the appearance of being cut or divided into segments ; and a 

 term of the same meaning, svropa, (tv and rtpvu,) was used by 

 the Greeks. 



The first attempt at the classification of Insects subsequent 

 to that of Aristotle was made by Aldrovandus, who, in a work 

 published in 1602, arranged them according to the medium 

 they inhabited, as Terrestrial or Aquatic. Mouffefs Thea- 

 trum fnsectorum, the fruit of the successive labours of several 

 men of talent, was published in 1634 ; but it was not till the 

 era of Swammerdam and Ray that the study of insects began 

 to assume a more philosophical form. The first of these, in his 

 Historia Insectorum Generalis, published in 1669? assumed 

 the transformation of insects as the basis of a natural arrange- 



