350 EXTERNAL ANATOMY OF INSECTS. 



I trust that what I have here advanced will excite your 

 attention to the subject I am now to enter upon ; and I 

 flatter myself, that although at first sight it may promise 

 nothing more than a dry and tedious detail of parts and 

 organs, you will find it not without its peculiar interest 

 and attraction. 



This department of the science — the Anatomy of In- 

 sects — may still be regarded as in its infancy ; and consi- 



infidelity are grafted. Nature, in the eyes of a large proportion of the 

 enemies of Revelation, occupies the place and does the work of its 

 Great Author. Thus Hume, when he writes against miracles, ap- 

 pears to think that the Deity has delegated some or all of his powers 

 to nature, and will not interfere with that trust. Essays, ii. 75 — . 

 And to name no more, Lamarck, treading in some measure in the 

 steps of Robinet (who supposes that all the links of the animal king- 

 dom, in which nature gradually ascends from low to high, were ex- 

 periments in her progress towards her great and ultimate aim — the 

 formation of man. Barclay On Organization, &c. 263), thus states his 

 opinion : " La nature, dans toutes ses operations, ne pouvant pro- 

 ceder que graduellement, n'a pu produire tous les animaux a-la-fois : 

 elle n'a d'abord forme que les plus simples; et passant de ceux-ci 

 jusques aux plus composes, elle a etabli successivement en eux dif- 

 ferens systemes d'organes particuliers, les a multiplies, en a augmente 

 de plus en plus l'energie, et, les cumulant dans les plus parfaits, elle 

 a fait exister tous les animaux connus avec l'organisation et les fa- 

 cultes que nous leur observons." (Anim. sans Vertebr. i. 123.) Thus 

 denying to the Creator the glory of forming those works of cre- 

 ation, the animal and vegetable kingdom (for he assigns to both the 

 same origin, Ibid. 83), in which his glorious attributes are most con- 

 spicuously manifested; and ascribing them to nature, or a certain 

 order of things, as he defines it (214)— a blind power, that operates 

 necessarily (311); which he admits, however, to be the pi'oduct of 

 the will of the Supreme Being (216). It is remarkable, that in his 

 earlier works, in which he broaches a similar opinion, we find no 

 mention of a Supreme Being. (See his Systeme des Animaux sans Ver- 

 tebres, Discours d'Ouverture.) Thus we may say that, like his fore- 

 runner Epicurus, Re tollit, dum oratione relinquit Beum. But though 

 he ascribes all to nature ; yet as the immediate cause of all the ani- 



