PKEFACE. 



The volume now completed perhaps requires two words of apology, 



(1) the apparently elementary character of the preliminary chapters, 



(2) the small number of species treated in the systematic part. 

 Whilst accumulating the material for our life-histories, we were 



struck with the remarkable paucity of useful observations on the 

 habits of the larvae. One was quite aware that the life-histories of 

 each species would have to be worked out de novo, and that detailed 

 descriptions, laying stress on structural characters, would have to be 

 made, yet one somehow expected that the actual details of the habits of 

 larvae which had supposedly been reared by a great many lepidopterists, 

 would be well-known, and have been often recorded, yet this was not 

 so, and, at the very outset of our attempt to write some general notes 

 on the larval habits of the Euralids, we were struck with the facts 

 that, (1) the information was either not available, or so scattered as to 

 be of very little use ; (2) the variation of the larval habits in different 

 groups was apparently so unequal (sometimes in allied species very 

 dissimilar, at others through large groups very similar), that, if carefully 

 considered, the facts might bring out some useful generalisations, and 

 the comparisons give a meaning to scattered observations, otherwise 

 almost meaningless. 



Simple, therefore, as these chapters appear, they are the outcome 

 of the expenditure of considerable time and labour, and the writer can 

 only hope that, as the chapters on " The family-habits of butterfly 

 larvae," here published, have crystallised, as it were, a mass of loose 

 ideas and filmy material floating in his own mind, so the reading of 

 them will crystallise similar ideas in the minds of his readers, and lead 

 them to make, and publish, systematic observations on one of the most 

 interesting features of the life -histories of our lepidoptera, and thus 

 give us the material by which we may more fully understand the main 

 directions in which their habits lead to, and help in, their protection, 

 either by their general appearance, their position of rest, peculiarity of 

 movement, particular form of eating, or by any special character the 

 larvae may exhibit. Elementary, then, as these preliminary chapters 

 are known to be, there can be no doubt that they are a great advance 

 on, and comprise a very much greater number of facts than, anything 

 ever previously published on this subject. And, here, we would 

 publicly thank our mentor in work of this kind, Mr. S. H. Scudder, 

 who, in his great work, The Butterflies of New England, not only 

 set a standard of excellence in dealing with the life-histories of 

 individual species that must leave its effect on the best biological 

 lepidopterists for all time, but also struck a strong note against the 

 so-called "museum " or "catalogue" entomology, which, growing out 

 of the Linnean shibboleths, tended to replace the natural history of 

 Keaumur and the old masters, and substituted the orderly cataloguing 

 of captures for the study of living things. How important both sides 

 of this work are to a true understanding of any branch of zoology was 

 never more clearly shown than by Scudder in his monumental work, 

 which must go down to the ages, the admiration of all those who 

 recognise how difficult pioneer work of any kind really is, and as 

 focussing the strugglings of Curtis, Stainton, Buckler, Hellins, and 

 others, in attempting to show that a knowledge of living things is, 

 after all, the true aim of the naturalist, that observations with the 



