PREFACE. yii 



and most considerable portion of their intended work, bringing into one 

 point of view, under distinct heads, the most interesting discoveries of 

 Reaumur, De Geer, Bonnet, Lyonet, the Hubers, he, as well as their 

 own individual observations, relative to the noxious and beneficial pro- 

 perties of insects, their affection for their young, their food, and modes of 

 obtaining it, their habitations, societies, &.c. he. ; and they were the more 

 induced to adopt this plan from the consideration that, though many of 

 the most striking of these facts have been before presented to the English 

 reader, a great proportion are unknown to him ; and that no similar gene- 

 ralization (if a slight attempt towards it in Smellie's Philosophy of Natural 

 History, and a confessedly imperfect one in Latreille's Histoire Naturelle 

 des Crustaces et des Insectes be excepted) has ever been attempted in any 

 language. Thus the entire work would be strictly on the plan of the 

 Philosophia Entomologica of Fabricius, only giving a much greater extent 

 to the (Economia and Usus, and adverting to these in the first place 

 instead of in the last. 



The epistolary form was adopted, not certainly from any idea of their 

 style being particularly suited to a mode of writing so difficult to keep 

 from running into incongruities, but simply because this form admitted 

 of digressions and allusions called for in a popular work, but which might 

 have seemed misplaced in a stricter kind of composition ; — because it is 

 better suited to convey those practical directions which in some branches 

 of the pursuit the student requires ; — and, lastly, because by this form 

 the objection against speaking of the manners and economy of insects 

 before entering upon the definition of them, and explaining the terms of 

 the science, — a retrograde course, which they have chosen from their 

 desire to present the most alluring side of the science first, — is, in great 

 measure, if not wholly, obviated. 



Such is the plan which the authors chalked out for themselves ; a plan 

 which in the execution they have found so much more extensive than 

 they calculated upon, that, could they have foreseen the piles of volumes 

 through which it has entailed upon them the labor of wading, often to 

 glean scarcely more than a single fact, the numerous anatomical and tech- 

 nological investigations which it has called for, and the long correspond- 

 ence, almost as bulky as the entire work, unavoidably rendered necessary 

 by the distant residence of the parties, they would have shrunk from an 

 undertaking of which the profit, if by great chance there should be any, 

 could not be expected to repay even the cost of books required in it, and 

 from which any fame must necessarily be confined to a very limited circle. 

 But having entered upon it, they have persevered ; and if they succeed 



