96 SUPPLEMENT ON 



mountainous, covered with large forests, and that its atmos- 

 phere is extremely humid, we may easily conceive that cer- 

 tain genera of insects of the old continent, such as anthia, 

 pemeliae, &c., which frequent dry grounds, sandy and very 

 warm situations, could not live in the unctuous, moist, and 

 umbrageous soil of the New World. Accordingly in propor- 

 tion, we find much fewer of the carnivorous coleoptera in 

 America, than in the older quarters of the globe. The size, 

 too, of such insects there, is often less than with us. The 

 scorpions of Cayenne, and of the other equinoxial countries 

 of America, are hardly larger than that one of the South of 

 Europe, which is named occitanus. They are far from 

 equalling the size of the African scorpion, which is as large 

 as our river crab. But, with regard to the species which 

 feed on vegetables, America does not yield to any country, 

 even the most fertile of the ancient continent. This is parti- 

 cularly true of lepidoptera, in general, of scarabeidce, of 

 chrysomelina, cerambycince, &c., and particularly wasps, 

 ants, orthoptera, and araneidcB ; nevertheless. Southern 

 China, and the Moluccas, appear to preserve a sort of supe- 

 riority in giving birth to such lepidoptera as the jiopilio 

 priamus, the hoinhyx atlas, &c., whose dimensions surpass 

 those of the American lepidoptera. A remarkable fact is, that 

 Europe, Africa, and Western Asia, have scarcely any insects 

 of the genns phasma, or spectrum, and that the species found 

 there are small, while the Moluccas, and South America, 

 present us with some of a remarkable size. The habitual 

 atmospheric humidity of the new continent, its narrow and 

 elongated form, the vast extent of ocean with which it is 

 surrounded on all parts, and the nature of its soil, furnish a 

 sufficient explanation of the discordance which is observed 

 between its climates, and those of our hemisphere, considered 

 under the same parallels. The New World is to the Ancient 

 Continent, what England is to a great part of Europe. 



