CHAPTER III 



THE CLASSIFICATION OF BUTTERFLIES 



11 Winged flowers, or flying gems." 



MOORE. 



AT the base of all truly scientific knowledge lies the principle 

 of order. There have been some who have gone so far as to say 

 that science is merely the orderly arrangement of facts. While 

 such a definition is defective, it is nevertheless true that no real 

 knowledge of any branch of science is attained until its relation- 

 ship to other branches of human knowledge is learned, and until 

 a classification of the facts of which it treats has been made. 

 When a science treats of things, it is necessary that these things 

 should become the subject of investigation, until at last their re- 

 lation to one another, and the whole class of things to which they 

 belong, has been discovered. Men who devote themselves to 

 the discovery of the relation of things and to their orderly clas- 

 sification are known as systematists. 



The great leader in this work was the immortal Linnaeus, the 

 "Father of Natural History," as he has been called. Upon the 

 foundation laid by him in his work entitled "Systema Naturae," 

 or " The System of Nature," all who have followed after him have 

 labored, and the result has been the rise of the great modern sci- 

 ences of botany and zoology, which treat respectively of the 

 vegetable and animal kingdoms. 



The Place of Butterflies in the Animal Kingdom. The animal 

 kingdom, for purposes of classification, has been subdivided into 

 various groups known as subkingdoms. One of these subking- 

 doms contains those animals which, being without vertebrae, or 

 an internal skeleton, have an external skeleton, composed of a 

 series of horny rings, attached to which are various organs. This 



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