OF SELBORNE. 153 



public to be a most useful and important work. What 

 knowledge there is of this sort lies scattered, and wants 

 to be collected ; great improvements would soon follow 

 of course. A knowledge of the properties, economy, 

 propagation, and, in short, of the life and conversation 

 of these animals, is a necessary step to lead us to some 

 method of preventing their depredations. 



As far as I am a judge, nothing would recommend 

 entomology more than some neat plates, that should 

 well express the generic distinctions of insects accord- 

 ing to Linnaeus ; for I am well assured that many 

 people would study insects, could they set out with a 

 more adequate notion of those distinctions than can be 

 conveyed at first by words alone 6 . 



LETTER XXXV. 



TO THE SAME. 



DEAR SIR, SELBORNE, 1771. 



HAPPENING to make a visit to my neighbour's pea- 

 cocks, I could not help observing that the trains of 



6 It is possible that the suggestion in the text may have had some 

 share, through the intervention of Pennant, in encouraging the publica- 

 tion, which took place about ten years afterwards, of Barbut's Genera 

 Insectorum of Linnaeus, exemplified by figures taken exclusively from 

 English specimens. But the genera adopted by Linnaeus were so few 

 in number that most of them included, of necessity, many variations of 

 form ; and as a single figure could give the representation but of one of 

 those variations, no sufficient idea of the others could be thus obtained. 

 Barbut's work remained, however,until of late years, the only English book 

 usually had recourse to for illustrations of the genera of insects : but the 

 English student has now, for such a purpose, in the British Entomology 

 of Mr. Curtis, a work which will always be of standard excellence. It 

 comprises already admirable representations of about six hundred insects, 

 typical of so many forms, inhabiting the British islands ; and furnishes, 

 in the most accurate manner, those detailed dissections of the cibarian 

 organs which are essential to a perfect knowledge of the economy of the 

 several genera, and to their proper disposition in a natural series. 

 K. T. B. 



