x _ PREYACE. ‘ 
equally slighted, Entomology now divides the empire with her sister 
Botany, this obstacle would not have been sufficient to deter num- 
bers from the study, had not another more powerful impediment 
existed,—the want of a popular and comprehensive Introduction 
to the science. While elementary books on Botany have been 
multiplied amongst us without end and in every shape, Curtis’s 
translation of the Fundamenta Entomologia, published in 1772, 
Yeats’s Institutions of Entomology, which appeared the year after, 
and Barbut’s Genera Insectorum, which came out in 1781,— the 
two former in too unattractive, and the latter in too expensive a 
form for general readers,—are the only works professedly devoted 
to this object which the English language ean boast. 
Convinced that this was the chief obstacle to the spread of En- 
tomology in Britain, the authors of the present work resolved to 
do what was in their power to remove it, and to introduce their 
countrymen to a mine of pleasure, new, boundless, and inexhaust- 
ible, and which, to judge from their own experience,— formed in 
no contracted field of comparison,—they can recommend as pos 
sessing advantages and attractions equal to those held forth by 
most other branches of human learning. 
The next question was, in what way they should attempt to 
accomplish this intention. If they had contented themselves with 
the first suggestion that presented itself, and merely given a trans« 
lation of one of the many Introductions to Entomology extant in 
Latin, German, and French, adding only a few obvious improve- 
ments, their task would have been very easy; but the slightest 
examination showed that, in thus proceeding, they would have 
stopped far short of the goal which they were desirous of reaching. 
In the technical department of the science they found much con- 
fusion, and numerous errors and imperfections; the same name 
sometimes applied to parts anatomically quite different, and dif- 
ferent names to parts essentially the same, while others of primary 
importance were without any name at all. And with reference to 
the anatomy and physiology of insects, they could nowhere meet 
with a full and accurate generalisation of the various facts con- 
nected with these subjects, scattered here and there in the pages 
of the authors who have studied them. 
They therefore resolved to begin, in some measure, de novo, to 
