x PREFACE. 



equally slighted, Entomology now divides the empire with her sister 

 Botany, this obstacle would not have been sufficient to deter num- 

 bers from the study, had not another more powerful impediment 

 existed, the want of a popular and comprehensive Introduction 

 to the science. While elementary books on Botany have been 

 multiplied amongst us without end and in every shape, Curtis's 

 translation of the Fundamenta Entomologies, published in 1772, 

 Yeats's Institutions of Entomology, which appeared the year after, 

 and Barbut's Genera Insectorum, which came out in 1781, >the 

 two former in too unattractive, and the latter in too expensive a 

 form for general readers, are the only works professedly devoted 

 to this object which the English language can boast. 



Convinced that this was the chief obstacle to the spread of En- 

 tomology in Britain, the authors of the present work resolved to 

 do what was in their power to remove it, and to introduce their 

 countrymen to a mine of pleasure, new, boundless, and inexhaust- 

 ible, and which, to judge from their own experience, formed in 

 no contracted field of comparison, they can recommend as pos- 

 sessing advantages and attractions equal to those held forth by 

 most other branches of human learning. 



The next question was, in what way they should atte mpt to 

 accomplish this intention. If they had contented themselves with 

 the first suggestion that presented itself, and merely given a trans- 

 lation of one of the many Introductions to Entomology extant in 

 Latin, German, and French, adding only a few obvious improve- 

 ments, their task would have been very easy ; but the slightest 

 examination showed that, in thus proceeding, they would have 

 stopped far short of the goal which they were desirous of reaching. 

 In the technical department of the science they found much con- 

 fusion, and numerous errors and imperfections ; the same name 

 sometimes applied to parts anatomically quite different, and dif- 

 ferent names to parts essentially the same, while others of primary 

 importance were without any name at all. And with reference to 

 the anatomy and physiology of insects, they could nowhere meet 

 with a full and accurate generalisation of the various facts con- 

 nected with these subjects, scattered here and there in the pages 

 of the authors who have studied them. 



They therefore resolved to begin, in some measure, de novo, to 



