INTRODUCTORY LETTER. 7 



The sight indeed of a well- stored cabinet of insects will bring before 

 every beholder not conversant with them, forms in endless variety, which 

 before he would not have thought it possible could exist in nature, re- 

 sembling nothing that the other departments of the animal kingdom exhibit, 

 and exceeding even the wildest fictions of the most fertile imagination. 

 Besides prototypes of beauty and symmetry, there in miniature he will be 

 amused to survey (for the most horrible creatures, when deprived o$ the 

 power of injury, become sources of interest and objects of curiosity), to 

 use the words of our great poet, 



all prodigious things, 



Abominable, unutterable, and worse 



Than fables yet have feign' d, or fear conceiv'd, 



Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimaeras dire. 



But the pleasures of a student of the science to which I am desirous of 

 introducing you, are far from being confined to such as result from an ex- 

 amination of the exterior form and decorations of insects; for could 

 these, endless as they seem, be exhausted, or, wonderful as they are, lose 

 their interest, yet new sources, exuberant in amusement and instruction, 

 may be opened, which will furnish an almost infinite fund for his curiosity 

 to draw upon. The striking peculiarity and variety of structure which 

 they exhibit in their instruments of nutrition, motion, and oviposition; in 

 their organs of sensation, generation, and the great fountains of vitality, 

 indeed their whole system, anatomically considered, will open a world of 

 wonders to you with which you will not soon be satiated, and during your 

 survey of which you will at every step feel disposed to exclaim with the 

 Roman naturalist " In these beings so minute, and as it were such non- 

 entities, what wisdom is displayed, what power, what unfathomable per- 

 fection ! " * But even this will not bring you to the end of your pleasures : 

 you must leave the dead to visit the living ; you must behold insects when 

 full of life and activity, engaged in their several employments, practising 

 their various arts, pursuing their amours, and preparing habitations for 

 their progeny : you must notice the laying and kind of their eggs ; their 

 wonderful metamorphoses ; their instincts, whether they be solitary or 

 gregarious ; and the other miracles of their history all of which will open 

 to you a richer mine of amusement and instruction, I speak it without 

 hesitation, than any other department of Natural History can furnish. A 

 minute enumeration of these particulars would be here misplaced, and 

 only forestall what will be detailed more at large hereafter ; but a rapid 

 glance at a very few of the most remarkable of them may serve as a stimu- 

 lus to excite your curiosity, and induce you to enter with greater eager- 

 ness into the wide field to which I shall conduct you. 



The lord of the creation plumes himself upon his powers of invention, 

 and is proud to enumerate the various useful arts and machines to which 

 they have given birth, not aware that " He who teacheth man knowledge " 

 has instructed these despised insects to anticipate him in many of them. 

 The builders of Babel doubtless thought their invention of turning earth 

 into artificial stone a very happy discovery 2 ; yet a little bee 3 had prac- 

 tised this art, using indeed a different process, on a small scale, and the 

 white ants on a large one, ever since the world began. Man thinks that 



i Plin. Hist. Nat. T. 11. c. 2. Gen. xi. 3, 



8 Megachile muraria. 



B 4 



