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ANALYSES OF BOOKS. 
Elementary Text-Book of Entomology . By W. F. Kirby, As- 
sistant in Zoological Department, British Museum, and 
Co-Secretary to the Entomological Society of London. 
London : W. Swan Sonnenschein and Co. 
We have here a work which in some respedts takes up ground 
not yet unoccupied. Accessible books on Entomology are for 
the most part devoted to some particular group of insedts, or to 
the species inhabiting some particular country. Mr. Kirby 
describes all the groups of insedts of the entire world. It is 
more systematic than the twin volumes by the Rev. J. G. Wood, 
“ Insedts at Home ” and “ Insedts Abroad,” freer from irrelevant 
refledtions, and from the initial error of putting the insedts of 
Britain — a group founded on a mixture of considerations, partly 
geographical and partly political — in antithesis to those of all the 
rest of the world. 
The author in his classification recognises the seven “ orders,” 
as they are commonly called, Coleoptera, Orthoptera, Neuroptera, 
Hymenoptera, Lepidoptera, Hemiptera, and Diptera. He con- 
sequently rejedts the separation of the earwigs from the Or- 
thoptera as a distindt order (Euplexoptera) ; he includes the 
suggested order Strepsiptera among the Coleoptera ; he assigns 
to the Heteroptera and Homoptera a subordinate rank as divi- 
sions of Hemiptera. He does not accept the strange proposal 
to form the Orthoptera together with the bulk of the Neuroptera 
into a new order, Pseudoneuroptera. 
Mr. Kirby, however, is no believer in linear classifications. 
Indeed, as an Evolutionist, he regards every classification as 
merely provisional and approximate. He writes : — “ Organic 
nature is now believed to have grown up into the form in which 
we see it from infinitesimal beginnings, by the effedt of gradual 
changes adting and readting on each other in the course of 
countless ages. We have consequently nothing before us to 
classify but the extreme ends of a vast tree, of the rest of which 
we are scarcely able to catch even the slightest glimpse. Con- 
sequently, while every group and every species is more or less 
related to others, a book arrangement can only be linear, and 
while it expresses a certain amount of affinity between the 
groups and species placed in juxtaposition, it likewise tends to 
conceal the fadt that equally important affinities frequently exist 
