Abstract
WE heartily welcome the appearance of this useful work, for there is no doubt that a complete monograph, on any order of insects, is a great stimulus to its further study in the country concerned. Our British Orthoptera have been rather neglected in the past, but Mr. Lucas's papers, which have regularly appeared in the entomological magazines, have done good service in awakening an interest in our native species. No one, therefore, is better qualified than he is to write a Ray Society volume on the order. The book is strong on the biological side, habits, times of appearance, and distribution being adequately treated, and many interesting facts are thus collected together. We should have liked to see a fuller account of the structure of Orthoptera and some remarks on their internal organisation, but recognise that the author probably has had to limit his pages very considerably owing to the expense of publication. The earwigs are regarded as a suborder rather than as constituting a separate order: out of twelve families only one—the Ectobiidæ—contains indigenous species. The crickets are represented by four species, including the remarkable and seldom observed mole cricket (Gryllo-talpa). Only nine species of long-horned grasshoppers are known with certainty to be natives, though possibly Phaneroptera falcata may eventually prove to be indigenous. There seems to be but a single record of a Locustid from Scotland and, in fact, our scanty British fauna compares very unfavourably with the 160 Western European representatives of the Locustodea. Of the short-horned grasshoppers, Mr. Lucas recognises eleven species, but none are migratory locusts. The twenty-five plates illustrating the work are on the whole adequate, though we fear Nos. 7, 14, and 19 have reproduced the objects concerned on too small a scale to be of very much service. These can scarcely fail to be a source of disappointment to the author, who is an expert in the art of delineation.
A Monograph of the British Orthoptera.
W. J.
Lucas
By. Pp. xii + 264 + xxv plates. (London: The Ray Society, 1920.) Price 25s. net.
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I., A. A Monograph of the British Orthoptera . Nature 106, 211 (1920). https://doi.org/10.1038/106211a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/106211a0