38 Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society, Vol. XIV 
fashion of the young of the primitive marsupials which are born 
at an earlier stage of development than the highly developed 
young of a horse, for example; but this is assuredly not the case, 
since the holometabolous insects are much higher forms than the 
insects which do not exhibit such a metamorphosis. As Fritz 
Mueller (Facts for Darwin, p. 118) aptly expressed it, “there 
were perfect insects before larve and pupe,” and not only does 
the morphology of the “non-metabolous”’ forms proclaim them 
-as nearer the ancestral type, but paleontology would also indi- 
cate that they were the first types to appear. The view that the 
larval stages represent “free-living embryos” is open to so many 
objections, that I prefer to seek the causes of the origin of meta- 
morphosis elsewhere, since I think that there is much more in- 
volved than could be explained by such an assumption. Further- 
more, I am enough of a “ Weismannian ” to believe that environ- 
ment could hardly cause metamorphosis (which I think would 
more probably have arisen through mutation, or some similar 
method), and would rather consider environment as one of the 
selective factors acting through natural selection (or similar 
means) to direct the course of development of metamorphosis 
which it did not originate! I shall return to this point later, 
however, since there are several other views on the subject, which 
necessitate a discussion of this principle. 
Lameere, in various publications, has developed the idea that 
the wood-boring habit has resulted in the production of meta- 
morphosis among the higher insects or, as he expreses it on page 
633 of the Ann. Soc. Ent. Belgique (Vol. 43, 1899), “ Nous 
pouvons ... inférer . . . que la perforation des troncs d’arbre 
est la cause adjuvante de l’apparition de l’holométabolisme.” 
This mode of life has resulted, he states, (p. 127 of the Annales, 
Vol. 52, 1908) in the following features characteristic of holo- 
metabolous insects: “raccourcissement des appendices, antennes, 
pattes et cerques ; remplacement des yeux composés par des yeux 
simples (for myopic vision) ; disparition de tout rudiment d’ailes.” 
As reasons for believing that holometabolism arose in this 
fashion, Lameere states that there are no insects with incomplete 
metamorphosis living inside of plants with the exception of the 
Isoptera (and a few primitive Blattidz), which are apterous dur- 
