PREFACE. xi 
institute a rigorous revision of the terms employed, making such 
additions and improvements as might seem to be called for; and 
_to attempt a more complete and collected account of the existing 
discoveries respecting the anatomical and physiological departments 
of the science than has yet been given to the world ;—and to these 
two points their plan at the outset was limited. 
It soon, however, occurred to them, that it would be of little 
use*to write a book which no one would peruse; and that, in the 
present age of love for light reading, there could not be much hope 
of leading students to the dry abstractions of the science, unless 
they were conducted through the attractive portal of the economy 
and natural history of its objects. To this department, therefore, 
they resolved to devote the first and most considerable portion of 
their intended work, bringing into one point of view, under dis- 
tinct heads, the most interesting discoveries of Reaumur, De Geer, 
Bonnet, Lyonet, the Hubers, &c., as well as their own individual 
observations, relative to the noxious and beneficial properties of 
insects, their affection for their young, their food, and modes of 
obtaining it, their habitations, societies, &c. &c.; 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 generalisation (if a slight attempt to- 
wards it in Smellie’s Philosophy of Natural History, and a confes- 
sedly imperfect one in Latreille’s Histoire Naturelle des Crustacés 
et des Insectes be excepted) has ever been attempted in any lan- 
guage. Thus the entire work would be strictly on the plan of the 
Philosophia Entomologica of Fabricius, only giving a much greater 
extent to the Gconomia 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 diffi- 
cult 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 
