LEPIDOPTERA. 
INTRODUCTION. 
Child of the sun ! pursue thy rapturous flight. 
Mingling with her thou lov’Bt, in fields of light ; 
And where the flowers of paradise unfold, 
Quaff fragrant nectar from their cups of gold. 
There Bhall thy wings, rich as an evening sky, 
Expand and shut with silent ecstasy. 
Yet wert thou once a worm, a thing that crept 
On the bare earth, then wrought a tomb, and slept! 
And such is man ; soon from his cell of clay 
To burst a seraph in the blaze of day I 
Rogers. 
The primary division, or Order, of the Class of 
Insects, to the illustration of which the present vo- 
lume is devoted, acquires its name, like all the other 
Linnean orders, from the characters presented by the 
wings. These members have their entire surface 
covered with a thick coating of minute imbricated 
scales, which has caused the insects to be designated 
by the name Lepidoptera, from Aswij, a scale, and 
wrsjot, wings. This clothing, however, is not uni- 
versal in the group, as there are several genera par- 
tially denuded of scales, and others in which the 
wings are clear and transparent, without any traces 
of them Rut these occasional deviations from the 
D 
