AMERICAN INSECTS 
CHAPTER I 
THE STRUCTURE AND SPECIAL 
PHYSIOLOGY OF INSECTS 
ERHAPS no more uninteresting matter, for 
the general reader or entomological amateur, 
can be written about insects than a descrip¬ 
tive catalogue of the parts and pieces of the 
insect body. And such matter is practically 
useless because it doesn’t stick in the reader’s 
mind. If it is worth while knowing the 
intimate make-up of a house-fly’s animated little body, it is worth 
getting this knowledge in the only way that will make it real, that is, 
by patient and eye-straining work with dissecting-needles and micro¬ 
scope. This book, anyway, is to try to convey some information about 
the kinds and ways of insects, and to stimulate interest in insect life, rather 
than to be a treatise on insect organs and their particular functions. Life 
is, to be sure, only the sum of the organic functions, but this sum or com¬ 
bination has an interest disproportionate to that of any of its component 
parts, and has an aspect and character which cannot be foretold in any com¬ 
pleteness from ever so careful a disjoined study of the particular functions. 
And so with the body, the sum of the organs: it is the manner and seeming 
of the body as a whole, its symmetry and exquisite adaptation to the special 
habit of life, the fine delicacy of its colors and pattern, or, at the other 
extreme, their amazing contrasts and bizarrerie, on which depend our first 
interest in the insect body. A second interest, although to the collector and 
amateur perhaps the dominant one, comes from that recognition of the 
differences and resemblances among the various insects which is simply 
the appreciation of kinds, i.e., of species. This interest expanded by oppor¬ 
tunity and observation and controlled by reason and the habit of order and 
arrangement is, when extreme, that ardent and much misunderstood and 
scoffed at but ever-impelling mainspring of the collector and classifier. 
