Insect architecture / [Anon].

  • James Rennie
Date:
1830
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Insect architecture / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    there were about one hundred species altogether new, and not before in any collection which he had in- spected, including several new genera; while many insects reputed scarce were in considerable plenty*. The localities of insects are, to a certain extent, con- stantly changing; and thus the study of them has, in this circumstance, as well as in their manifold abundance, a source of perpetual variety. Insects, also, which are plentiful one year, frequently become scarce, or disappear altogether, the next—a fact strikingly illustrated by the uncommon abundance, in 1826 and 1827, of the seven-spot lady-bird (Coc- cinella septempunctata), in the vicinity of London, though during the two succeeding summers this insect was comparatively scarce, while the small two- spot lady-bird (Coccinella bipunctata) was plen- tiful. There is, perhaps, no situation in which the lover of nature and the observer of animal life may not find opportunities for increasing his store of facts. It is told of a state prisoner under a cruel and rigorous despotism, that when he was excluded from all com- merce with mankind, and was shut out from books, he took an interest and found consolation in the visits of a spider; and there is no improbability in the story. The operations of that persecuted creature are among the most extraordinary exhibitions of me- chanical ingenuity; and a daily watching of the workings of its instinct would beget admiration in a rightly constituted mind. The poor prisoner had abundant leisure for the speculations in which the spider’s web would enchain his understanding. We have all of us, at one period or other of our lives, been struck with some singular evidence of contrivance in the economy of insects, which we have seen with our * Stephens’s Illustrations, vol. i., p. 72, note.
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