Vi PREFACE. 



time something of the order and method of ar- 

 rangement by means of which the thousands of 

 creatures forming the insect world have been 

 named, classed, and grouped into homogeneous 

 families, so as to facilitate their study, and enable 

 naturalists to methodize, in an orderly and easily 

 accessible form, all the successive discoveries of 

 those who have made this branch of natural history 

 their particular study. 



Order and arrangement are always among the 

 first wants experienced by young naturalists. Even 

 children, in their first gatherings of wild flowers, 

 seem to have an instinctive desire to sort out those 

 of similar colours or appearance, and group each 

 kind together. The lamented Hugh Miller, in his 

 very last work, " The Testimony of the Rocks," 

 has especially dwelt upon this natural tendency of 

 the human mind to that kind of order and classifi- 

 cation upon which the arrangement or summing up 

 of all positive science is founded; and several 

 other physiologists have also noticed this general 

 and unmistakable tendency. 



A feeling of this kind was one of the first 

 which I experienced myself, as a tyro in entomology ; 

 for I soon became convinced that the learning the 

 mere name of the insect whose habits I had been 



