12 
PROCEEDINGS OF SOCIETIES. 
did not, however, discern its specific application in this instance, and followed 
Fabricius, as his master, in the definition of the Hemiptera. Latreille, to whom 
the honour is usually assigned of being the founder, as he was certainly the 
most influential advocate of the u eclectic” method, accepted the order Ductoria; 
but in his successive works he varied repeatedly the position assigned to it 
in relation to the other orders—betraying sufficiently, in those numerous trans¬ 
positions, the want of one great leading principle of arrangement, such as 
is embodied in the several systems of dominant organs, whether alary, cibarian, 
or tarsal, with all their attendant defects, or in the physiological method, that 
subordinates them all to the plan of animal development, which had been 
regarded primarily by Swammerdam and Ray. Oken was the first who seized 
as a scientific fact Roesel’s not unscientific accommodation, and consigned 
the flea to the order Diptera,* a conclusion which the able physiologist Strauss 
Durckheim has attested, with almost epigrammatic brevity, in the sentence, 
u fleas may be considered as dipterous insects without wings.”t Oken’s study 
of nature was too extended for us to cite him as an entomologist in par¬ 
ticular. The transcendental scheme which rose to his view, sitting at the 
feet of Schelling, had itself to undergo no slight metamorphosis before it was 
matured into the present physiological—as its disciples call it, philosophical— 
or, as others speak, German school of natural history. But that particular 
conclusion has been accepted by the most eminent names among his successors— 
Burmeister, Siebold, Erichson, Schioedte—down to the present time. Lamarck, 
again, retaining the order Aptera for these insects, declared their closest affinity 
to the Diptera. Most of the French and English entomologists dispose of them 
as a distinct order, intermediate between the Diptera and Hemiptera. MacLeay, 
in the ingenious volumes which ushered his quinary system into the world, 
has so placed them, also ; but has derived, out of the conditions of the circular 
arrangement, another relation of analogy to the Coleoptera.J Leach introduced 
them between the Hemiptera and Lepidoptera, a position coinciding with one 
of Latreille’s changeful arrangements.§ Duges, on the other hand, with the 
advantage of a more thorough study of their organization, admits the com¬ 
parison with the orders Diptera and Hymenoptera alone. || As a distinct order, 
they have been treated by^ all the modern English school, (reproached by 
the philosophical naturalists of Germany with a propensity to multiply divi¬ 
sions),* * § ([ until Newman came forward to advocate, as these have done, their 
subordination to the type of Diptera.** This view, again combated by West- 
wood,ff has been adopted, in the only text-book of British Diptera that we 
possess.JJ 
The writer of this notice, having occasion to consider these conflicting 
opinions, found a lack of information on various points of the organization 
of Pulex which might bear upon the question, and was led, in consequence, 
* Naturgeschichte fur Schulen. a.d. 1821. 
f Anat. Comp, des An. s. vert. p. 10. 
| Horae Entomologicae 1.1. 
§ Annales du Museum, a.d. 1821.—Leach, article Entomology in the Edin¬ 
burgh Encyclopaedia. 
|| Annales des Sc. Nat. 16.—Cours de Zoologie. 
% Burmeister, Manual of Entomology vol. 2, p. 407. u Haliday * * * 
after the fashion of his compatriots, who seem to consider the multiplication of 
subdivisions as the highest aim of descriptive Zoology, has made of the Linnean 
genus Thrips a new order, which he calls Thysanoptera, etc.” I am now quite 
disposed to acquiesce in Burmeister’s sentence, as regards the particular case, 
and do not feel called on to protest against the sweeping generality of his obiter 
dictum. 
** Zoologist a.d. 1851, App. cxliii. 
ff Proceedings of the Entomological Society of London for 1852. p. 162. 
it Insecta Britannica, the Diperta, by F. Walker, F.L.S. 3 vols. 1851, ’52, ’55, 
