108 STATES OF INSECTS. 



pod, with but three segments and as many pairs of feet, 

 but successively acquired five additional segments with 

 other appendages, and nine more pairs of feet 3 . A spe- 

 cies of millepede {lulus terresiris L.), which he also 

 traced from its birth, and which begins the world at first 

 with only eight segments and six feet, by a successive 

 development at length acquires, in its perfect state, 50 

 segments and not less than 200 feet b . The nature of 

 these very singular accretions, which Latreille and Mr. 

 Wm. MacLeay have also observed in the centipedes c , 

 seems not well understood. If, as is most probable, 

 though De Geer could not find any exuviae c , the larvae 

 cast a skin before each change, they do not essentially 

 differ from the metamorphosis of other insects. The 

 legs that these insects thus acquire are affixed to the 

 abdomen, the six that they set out with being attached 

 to the part representing the trunk, so that the former 

 may be regarded as analogous to the prolegs of cater- 

 pillars. These animals therefore, as I have before inti- 

 mated, invert the order of Nature, and from perfect de- 

 generate into imperfect insects. 



ii. If you examine the cockroach, cricket, or grasshop- 

 per, in different stages of their growth, you will find that 

 the larva does not vary essentially from the perfect insect, 

 except in wanting wings and elytra. The case is the 

 same in almost all the Linnean genera of the modern 

 crder — Hemiptera ; and with Raphidia, Termes, and 

 Psocus, in the Neuroptera. Some of these, however, ex- 



, a De Geer vii. 576. b Ibid. 584. 



e Cojisiderat. Gener. 21. Horce Entomolog. 353. 

 d De Geer, Ibid. Mr. W. MacLeay observes of the Chilopoda, or 

 Centipedes, that they moult in the manner of Crustacea, ubi supr. 352. 



