OBJECTIONS ANSWERED. 27 
But it is not merely in travellers and popular observers that the want of 
a systematic knowledge of Entomology is so deplorable. A great portion 
of the Jabours of the profoundest naturalists has been from a similar cause 
lost to the world, Many of the insects concerning which Reaumur and 
Bonnet have recorded the most interesting circumstances, cannot, from 
their neglect of system, be at this day ascertained.! The former, as Beck- 
mann? states on the authority of his letters, was before his death sensible 
of his great error in this respect ; but Bonnet, with singular inconsistency, 
constantly maintained the inutility of system, even on an occasion when, 
from his ignorance of it, Sir James Smith, speaking of his experiments on 
the barberry, found it quite impossible to make him comprehend what 
plant he referred to.® 
So great is the importance of a systematic arrangement of insects. Yet 
no such arrangement has hitherto been completed. Various fragments 
towards it, indeed, exist. But the work itselfisin the state of a dictionary 
wanting a considerable proportion of the words of the language it professes 
to explain ; and placing those which it does contain in an order often so 
arbitrary and defective, that it is: difficult to discover even the page con- 
taining the word you are in search of. Can it be denied, then, that they 
are most meritoriously employed who devote themselves to the removal of 
these defects—to the perfecting of the system—and to clearing the path of 
future economical or physiological observers from the obstructions which 
now beset it? And who that knows the vast extent of the science, and 
how impossible it is that a divided attention can embrace the whole, will 
contend that it is not desirable that some labourers in the field of litera- 
ture should devote themselves entirely and exclusively to this object ? 
Who that is aware of the importance of the comprehensive views of a 
Fabricius, an Illiger, or a Latreille, and the infinite saving of time of which 
their inquiries will be productive to their followers, will dispute their claim 
to rank amongst the most honourable in science ? 
II. No objection, I think, now remains against addicting ourselves to — 
entomological pursuits, but that which seems to have the most weight with 
you, and which indeed is calculated to make the deepest impression upon 
the best minds—I mean the charge of inhumanity and cruelty. That the— 
science of Entomology cannot be properly cultivated without the death of 
its objects, and that this is not to be effected without putting them to some 
pain, must be allowed; but that this substantiates the charge of cruelty, I 
altogether deny. Cruelty is an unnecessary infliction of suffering, when a 
person is fond of torturing or destroying God’s creatures from mere wan- 
tonness, with no useful end in view; or when, if their death be useful and — 
lawful, he has recourse to circuitous modes of killing them where direct 
ones would answer equally well. This is cruelty, and this with you I 
abominate ; but not the infliction of death when a just occasion calls for it. 
They who see no cruelty in the sports of the field, as they are called, can 
never, of course, consistently allege sucha charge against the Entomologist; 
the tortures of wounded birds, of fizh that swallow the hook and break the 
1 No one knew Reaumw’s Abcille Tapissiere, until Latreille. happily combining 
system with attention to the economy of insects, proved it to be a new species— 
his Megachile Papaveris.—Hist. de Fourmis, 297. 
2 Bibliotheh, vii. 810. 
5 Tour on the Continent, iii, 150. 
