Our Common Insects

Abstract

IN this fully illustrated little work Mr. Packard, the author of the excellent and much larger “Guide to the Study of Insects,” gives a short and popular account of entomology generally, by taking a series of types from amongst the best-known North American insects, and describing them in detail. We should have liked to find some of the descriptions rather more explicit, as they might have been, without any alteration in the size of the volume, if some of the illustrations had not been so frequently repeated. In a work like Euclid there is no doubt considerable advantage in having the figures so placed that it is not necessary to turn over the pages in referring to them, especially when it has to be read by boys; but when space is short and the subject of such general interest, we cannot help feeling that their repetition, three times in more than a single instance, is quite uncalled for. The author's own work at the development of Insecta, which he has published in the “Memoirs of the Peabody Academy of Science,” enables him to take a larger view of his subject than that held by most. This is particularly indicated in the very suggestive chapter entitled “Hints on the Ancestry of Insects,” in which the researches of Ganin, Lubbock, Brauer, Haeckel, and Müller are all brought to bear on such questions as the relation of the Zoca form of the embryonic Crustacean to the similarly undeveloped and generalised, here termed Leptus, form of Insecta, in which the configuration is ovate, the head is large, bearing from two to four pairs of mouth-organs resembling legs, and the thorax is merged with the abdomen; this general embryonic form characterising the larvæ of the Arachnida, the Myriapods, and the true Insects. The elaborate observations of the first-named of these authors on the development of Platygaster error, an ichneumon parasite, in the author's mind tend to confirm the theory held by him that the ancestry of all the Insects, including the Arachnids and Myriapods, should be traced directly to the worms. We recommend this small book to all interested in the progress of this branch of invertebrate zoology.

Our Common Insects.

By A. S. Packard jun. (Naturalist's Agency, Salem, Mass.)