THE ENTOMOLOGISTS 
WEEKLY INTELLIGENCER. 
No. 4.] SATURDAY, APRIL 26, 1856. [Price Id. 
WHAT IS THE MEANING OF AN 
INSECT BEING BRITISH? 
Some persons are very much puzzled 
with this question ; we will endeavour 
to clear up the difficulties by which we 
admit it to be surrounded. A lioness 
was once found at large on Salisbury 
Plain, but it is not on that account num- 
bered amongst the British Mammalia. 
No doubt had there been a ‘Zoologist’ 
in existence at the time, in which to 
record such notabilia, some Wiltshire 
naturalist, zealous to increase the cata- 
logue of animals of his native county, 
would have called attention to the fact 
of a new British Mammal ! and an inte- 
resting discussion would probably have 
arisen. 
Ornithologists include in their lists of 
British birds any bird that has been shot 
at large in our islands, whether its home 
be America, China or Australia ; but en- 
tomologists have never acted on that 
principle, and, if the study of the Ento- 
mology of a single isolated district is to 
be of any practical value, it is to be hoped 
that they never will. There are very few 
parts of the globe which have not con- 
tributed to furnish us with living insects, 
but as they are not generally consigned 
to any particular party, nor even entered 
in the manifest of the vessel that brings 
them over, we do not receive a certificate 
of their foreign origin, and when we first 
meet with such things they frequently 
get entered into our lists of indigenous 
species quite innocently. A subsequent 
discovery of the real habitat of the “stray 
beastie” enables us to purify our list by 
expunging the foreigner. 
Those insects are held to be British 
which breed here permanently, whether 
originally indigenous or not. It is ex- 
tremely probable that Lil/iocolletis Mes- 
saniella has been imported along with its 
favourite food-plant, the evergreen oak, 
but it is so completely naturalized here 
that p one thinks of rejecting it from 
his collection as a non-British species. 
Again, CEcophora pseudospretella and 
Gelechia cerealella have probably both 
been domiciled here through the agencies 
of commerce; but the former is quite as 
much at home in the metropolis as the 
cockroach, which also was not originally 
a native. 
Some insects are occasional visitors, 
not breeding regularly here, but coming 
across the channel voluntarily in par- 
ticular seasons ; thus Chccrocampa. Nerii, 
properly at home in the South of France 
and in Italy, occasionally wanders over 
German}', the North of France, and visits 
our southern coast. It evidently does not 
belong to the same class of visitors as 
those beetles which we import from tro- 
pical countries iu the larva state in logs 
of wood. 
