Abstract
ATTEMPTS to give “popular” accounts of the several orders, families, and other subdivisions into which insects are classified almost invariably fail from lack of the courage needed to set before the general reader those details of structure that must be mastered in order to discriminate order from order, genus from genus, and, still more, species from species. In the absence of such information books such as this by Mr. Step become, except to those already versed in entomology, meaningless in many of their pages. We should welcome statements which would enable the enthusiastic beginner to determine whether the specimen in his hand was, say, a stone-fly, a may-fly, a lacewing-fly, or a caddis-fly and others rendering clear the structural differences between, say, the pierid and the nymphalid butterflies; and so on. We decline to believe that shirking the difficulties will ever popularise or in any way benefit the science of entomology. The figures in the plates of this book are unfortunately not numbered; thus the uninstructed reader is left in doubts as to the application of the numbers given in the respective legends.
British Insect Life: A Popular Introduction to Entomology.
E.
Step
By. Pp. 264 + 32 plates. (London: T. Werner Laurie, Ltd., N.D.) 10s. 6d. net.
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British Insect Life: A Popular Introduction to Entomology . Nature 109, 514 (1922). https://doi.org/10.1038/109514e0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/109514e0