THE ENTOMOLOGIST’S 
No. 193.] SATUEDAY, JUNE 10, 1860 [Price li. 
SEGMENTS. 
In ouv No. 190, p. 63, Mr. Merrin, in 
writing on the subject of “ unknown 
larvae,” says, “ It would be desirable, 
whenever a strange larva is taken, for 
the collector to make a note, on the 
spot, of the time, place and food, and 
on reaching home to write a short 
description of it in his journal.” 
Now, unless the inexperienced col- 
lector has paid some attention to larvae, 
he will be certain to give himself much 
unnecessary trouble, and at the same 
time write very unintelligible descrip- 
tions, if he begins off-hand to describe 
the first larva that he meets with. 
Let him take, for instance, the larva 
— conspicuous and grotesque enough — 
of Notodonta Ziczac ; on W'hich seg- 
ments are its humps placed? Some 
authors mention these humps as being 
on the fifth, sixth and seventh seg- 
ments; others say that they are on 
the sixth, seventh and eighth. Now 
which of these statements is the more 
correct ? 
If our readers will refer to the wood- 
cut of the dissected Elater larvae in 
Newman’s ‘ Familiar Introduction to 
the History of Insects,’ p. 137, they 
will see clearly how the larva is divided 
into thirteen segments, and, at p. 140 
of the same, work, they will read that 
the first segment is the head. 
Dallas, in his ‘ Elements of Ento- 
mology,’ after remarking that the num- 
ber of segments in insects is pretty 
uniformly thirteen, proceeds, at p. 8, 
The first segment is the head. 
Westwood, in his ‘Introduction to 
the Modern Classification of Insects,’ 
vol. i. p. 5, mentions that the usually 
supposed typical number of segments 
is thirteen, then alludes to the distribu- 
tion of the segments into three distinct 
regions (head, thorax and abdomen), 
and informs us that “ the head con- 
sists of a single segment,” which is of 
course the first segment. 
We purposely dwell upon the sub- 
ject, in order to impress on all our 
younger readers that the head is the 
first segment. It is so constantly over- 
looked in describing larvae, and the 
head is, so to speak, ignored on account 
of its different structure from the re- 
maining segments. 
The segment behind the head (which 
is often so erroneously called the first 
segment) is the second segment, and 
the segments which represent the tho- 
rax and bear the thoracic or true 
legs (so beautifully developed in the 
Lobster caterpillar, Stauropus Fagi,) 
M 
