RfiAUMUR AND THE HISTORY OF INSECTS 55 



man, and had to engage artists to draw for him. One 

 qualification of the first importance, however, he 

 possessed in a high degree, the scientific mind. As he 

 watched the acts of an insect, questions at once 

 sagacious and practical suggested themselves in 

 abundance, and these questions he set himself to 

 answer in the best possible way — viz., by observation 

 and experiment. In close attention to the activities of 

 living things his ingenuity and patience found a bound- 

 less sphere of exercise. Moreover all that he had seen 

 he could relate in a simple but picturesque manner, 

 using the language familiar to the best French society 

 in the generation next after Madame de S6vign^. 

 Diffuse but clear, amusing but never frivolous, he won 

 and kept the attention of a multitude of readers, the 

 best of whom were incited to adopt his methods or to 

 pursue inquiries which he had indicated. His greatest 

 successes were won in observing and interpreting the 

 natural contrivances of insects, the means by which 

 they get their food and provide for their safety ; their 

 transformations, instincts, and societies. Kirby and 

 Spence, which is still one of the best popular accounts 

 of insects in English, is largely based upon Reaumur ; 

 so are other well-known treatises, in which the debt is 

 less frankly acknowledged, Reaumur greatly enlarged 

 the knowledge of all kinds of insects except the beetles 

 and Orthoptera, which he did not live to describe, and 

 to this day his Histoire des Insectes is a work of funda- 

 mental importance, with which every investigator of 

 life-histories is bound to make himself acquainted. 



No abstract of Reaumur's Histoire des Insectes is 

 possible, but we may at least give one example of his 

 mode of treatment. Let us select his account of the 

 proboscis of a moth, the first full account that was ever 



