Abstract
ENTOMOLOGISTS are fond of attaching themselves to some special group of insects—bees, beetles, or butterflies; but there are very few, we believe, who take an interest in collecting the winged or wingless forms of the Aphides. One is very apt to overlook the value of the work of a mere collector, but it comes home to us when amid a group so large, and so important from an economic point of view, as this of the plant lice is, we find only some half a dozen of our British naturalists collecting specimens of the species or making observations on the marvellously strange habits of their heterogeneous forms. Under these circumstances it was most fortunate that a society like the Ray Society was in existence, for the number of those interested in the subject of the history of British Aphides would have been too miserably small to have justified any publisher, no matter how energetic, from publishing an account of these insects; but, thanks to the Ray Society, we have, as the works published by them for their subscribers for the years 1875, 1877,1880, and 1883, four handsome octavo volumes by Mr. G. Bowdler Buckton, F.R.S., which seem well entitled to their designation of a “Monograph of the British Aphides.” These volumes, besides the text, contain over 140 plates, of which ten are devoted to anatomical details, and the rest to coloured portraits of the species both in their immature and various mature forms, and in some few instances there are representations.of the various parasites which feed on them. It is to be specially noted that these figures are both drawn and lithographed by the author, and certainly a more interesting series of life-like figures of Aphides is nowhere to be found.
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British Aphides 1 . Nature 29, 288–290 (1884). https://doi.org/10.1038/029288a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/029288a0