REAUMUR 253 



pleasant to read. Reaumur found that the descriptions 

 of insects published before his time were too concise and 

 dry, and made a point of suppressing technicalities and 

 discussing questions in which readers who are neither 

 collectors nor anatomists might be expected to take an 

 interest. Charm of style is however the least of his 

 merits ; he was one of the best observers that ever lived 

 and enriched every topic with a profusion of new facts. 



Reaumur's most notable predecessors, as he remarks, 

 were more successful in depicting than in describing 

 insects. Madame Merian had issued a hundred beautiful 

 plates of insect-transformations, and had also painted 

 many of the remarkable insects of Surinam ; ^ Eleazar 

 Albin had figured many English lepidoptera with their 

 larvae ; ^ Goedart ^ and Frisch had bestowed much labour 

 upon the life-histories of insects. But these works, 

 though useful to the naturalist, left almost untouched 

 that field of inquiry which Reaumur called '* the indus- 

 tries of insects," and this he determined to occupy. 



He does not by any means restrict the word Insect to 

 annulose animals, and it does not shock him that slugs, 

 star-fishes, sea-anemones, reptiles, and amphibians should 

 be ranked as insects. All animals, in short, except 

 quadrupeds, birds, and fishes, come under Reaumur's 

 " Insects." His reason for bringing reptiles into the 

 insect-class is apparently only this, that reptiles (or 

 some of them) creep on the ground. " Un Crocodile 

 seroit un furieux insecte ; je n'aurois pourtant aucune 

 peine a lui donner ce nom." * 



' Der Raupen 7minderbare Vertvandeluny uiul sonderbare Blumeniuihrung 

 (1079); hisecta Suriiuivienda (1705). 



"^Natural Hintory of Englinh Insects (1720). 



^ MetamorphosiH et Hist. Nat. Insectoruni (1(KJ2.7); traiislattxl into English 

 by Martin Lister (1682). 



*Vol. I, p. 68. 



