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PREFACE. 



portal of the economy and natural history of its ob- 

 jects. 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 distinct heads, the most interesting discoveries 

 of Reaumur, De Geer, Bonnet, Lyonet, the Hubers, 

 &CC., 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 Enghsh reader, a great proportion 

 are unknown to him ; and that no similar general- 

 isation (if a slight attempt towards it in Smellie's 

 Philosophy of Natural History, and a confessedly 

 imperfect one in Latreille's Histoire Naiurelle des 

 Crustaces et des Insectes be excepted) has ever been 

 attempted in any language. Thus the entire work 

 would be strictly on the plan of the Philosophia En- 

 tomologica of Fabricius, only giving a much greater 

 extent to the CEconomia 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 difHcult to keep from run- 

 ning into incongruities, but simply because this form 

 admitted of digressions and allusions called for in a 

 popular work, but wliich might have seemed mis- 

 placed 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 j — and, lastly, because by this form the 



