280 INSECTS. 



English writers have transposed the families grillidoB 

 and locustidoe to suit the popular translation of the 

 Scriptures, and have introduced a separate order called 

 trichoptera. 



As they are principally minute objects, wise men 

 wisely concluded the deficiency should be made up in 

 length of name, and but one class appears under the 

 weight of less than four syllables. The families compos- 

 ing these orders are almost innumerable, and only those 

 that are allied to the subject in hand can even be men- 

 tioned. Amateur entomologists prefer the coleoptera for 

 their beauty and variety, and collections of insects are 

 mainly composed of brilliant, gaudy and wondrous bee- 

 tles, varying in size from the giant, as large as the pretty 

 fist of one of the reader's little female acquaintances, to 

 the pigmy that is hardly perceptible to the eye. There 

 is the beautiful and useful lady-bird, the wonderful light- 

 ning-bug, the elephant beetle with trunk and tusks, the 

 hercules with stout heavy limbs, the palm weevil, whose 

 disgusting grubs are eaten as delicacies by the deluded 

 people of St. Domingo, and many other dangerous look- 

 ing fellows with long sharp snouts that are really harm- 

 less, and innocent looking fellows that are really danger- 

 ous. The fly-fisher, however, relies for his pleasure 

 mainly upon his imitations of the neuroptera and diptera, 

 and not so much upon the coleoptera. 



The young of the insect tribe, when it issues from the 

 shell in the shape of a worm, is known as the larva, 

 although the larvse of some butterflies are called cater- 

 pillars, and of certain flies maggots. When the larva 

 begins its metamorphose it is named a pupa or chrysalis, 



