greater number of insects come from a worm (scolex): " the whole worm grows larger," he says, " and becomes an articulated animal[1]."
Aristotle has well observed that the Spiders, Grasshoppers, and Crickets are not produced from worms, but from animals similar to themselves. These ideas upon the metamorphosis of insects are very exact, and though Aristotle blends with them a few errors, which it is unnecessary to consider here, they afford proof of the perseverance with which he pursued his observations, and the surprising skill which he possessed for generalizing acquired facts, and for discovering and predicting those not previously observed.
It must not be forgotten that it is in relation to the manner in which coition is effected in insects that Aristotle names the Spondyle; and the Chafer is precisely one of those insects which present themselves most frequently to our notice in coition.
From the text of Pliny and the assertion of Agricola, it appears that among the Latins, and the Greeks of the Lower Empire the name of Spondyle has been retained to denote the larva of the large species of Chafer, with the metamorphosis of which they were unacquainted. That an insect so common as the Chafer, and which acts a part so important to agriculture by the mischief which it occasions, even in the state of a perfect insect, to the leaves of plants and trees, was known to the Latins as well as to the Greeks, cannot be doubted; but we are ignorant whether they gave it a particular name, or whether they included it under the general names of Scarabæus and Cantharis, so often employed by them to denote all kinds of Coleoptera.
Fabricius, who has detached the Chafers from the genus Scarabæus of Linnæus, has given to this genus the name of Melolontha, which the Swedish naturalist had assigned as the specific name of the most common species. This name is borrowed from Aristotle, who employs it in the same manner as those of Cantharis and Carabus, to denote various species of Scarabæi, which in our natural systems belong to very different families or to very dissimilar genera. It was from the opinion of the learned of the time of Aldrovandus[2], and adopted by Bochart[3], that Linnæus made the Melolontha of Aristotle our common Cockchafer; but, as Latreille has well observed[4], from a comparison of the texts of Suidas, Pollux, and the scholiast on Aristophanes, it appears that the name Melolontha was given, among the Greeks, to insects of brilliant colours, a description which does not apply to the common Cockchafer.
- ↑ Aristotle, book v. chap. 19. vol. i, pp. 286 and 287; book i. chap. 4. No. 1. and books v., xii., and xvii. of Schneider's edition, 8vo, 1811, vol. ii. chap. 17. (vulgò 19. Scaliger 18), vol. ii. p. 207.
- ↑ Aldrovandus, De Animalibus Insectis, p. 17.
- ↑ Bochart, Hierozoicon, part ii. book iv. chap. 2.
- ↑ See Latreille's Memoir upon the Insects painted or sculptured upon the ancient Monuments of Egypt, in the Mémoires sur divers Sujets, 8vo.
