A NATURAL HISTORY OF BRITISH MOTHS.*
WE can easily imagine that the announcement of the publication of a Natural History of British Moths will awaken a strong desire in many of our readers to become possessed of so desirable a treatise. There are probably some thousands, especially among the younger portion of our population, who pay a little attention to entomology, and of these by far the greater number devote their energies to the study of the Butterflies and Moths, the two great groups of insects forming the order Lepidoptera of entomologists. To these, if we may judge from the recollections of our own early feelings, no present could be more welcome than a good Natural History of British Moths.
It is true that in the great majority of cases the so-called entomologist is in reality only a collector, who cares a little, perhaps, for the prettiness of the objects of his pursuit, but values them chiefly on account of their rarity, and glories more in making his collection as complete as he can than in the acquisition of that knowledge of the structure, habits, and classification of insects which constitutes the real object of the entomologist's endeavours. But we must not quarrel even with this low phase of the cultiva- tion of entomology,—the pursuit of insects for the sake of forming a collection is at least a harmless and healthy occupation, and the collector of butterflies and moths is certainly on a higher stand-point than the votary of postage-stamps, inasmuch as some little natural-history knowledge must accrue to him in the course of his labours, especially if he takes the trouble of rearing his specimens from their young state.
This rudimentary knowledge a good work on the natural history of the group ought to convert into sound scientific know- ledge, the value of which, in an educational point of view, must not be measured by the extent or importance of the particular group selected for study, for the method of natural-history investi- gation being in all cases virtually the same, the student. of a single class or order acquires a set of ideas which will carry him a long way towards the comprehension of the more general problems of natural history. Let us now see how far the book whose title stands at the head of this article, is adapted to fulfil this purpose.
Considering the great diversity in the characters and habits of the insects to be described in it, the writer of A Natural History of British Moths has, it must be confessed, no very easy task before him, and even if his work should present a good many imperfec- tions, any but the severest of critics would be inclined to treat these with tenderness. But we certainly ought to find in such a book a sound exposition of the existing views as to classification, with indications of the reasons why the insects are arranged in such and such families and genera,—in other words, the characters of the groups should be given, as without a knowledge of these the study of classification is impossible. In most cases these descriptions of groups should be supplemented with general accounts of the habits and mode of life of the species referred to them, for, as is well known to naturalists, the habits of the species of any given group of animals frequently present general resem- blances as marked as those structural similarities by means of which their position in the system is determined. Peculiarities in the history of the individual species would of course have to be indicated under the descriptions of the species themselves, which certainly should not be omitted, and which may, when prac- ticable, be supplemented by figures.
Now when we examine Mr. Morris's History of British Moths, and compare its execution with that of an imaginary work fal A Natural History of British Meths. By the Rev. '. 0. Morris, B.A. 4 vols. London: H. E. Knox. 1871. filling the moderate requirements above stated (and, indeed, ful- filling the promise of his own title-page), we find that the only portion of our scheme which is at all well carried out is that with which an author has least to do, namely, the illustrations. These are exceedingly numerous, occupying no fewer than 132 plates, and including a figure of every species, and in some cases of the principal varieties. The figures are generally exceedingly well executed and life-like ; they are all coloured, and will doubt- less afford great assistance to many a collector in naming his captures.
But this is not sufficient. Without descriptions even good figures are often liable to mislead, and except in his first volume, our author makes no attempt to indicate in words the characters by which the species are distinguished from each other. Thus considerably more than three-fourths of the species are left unde- scribed,* for the last two volumes include all the smallest species, of which a great number can be figured on a single plate, and the first volume does not contain one-fourth of the whole number of plates. Of the descriptions given by the author in his first volume, we can only say that we do not see what advantage they have over those given by his predecessors.
The information actually given by Mr. Morris in the middle part of his work is as follows :—Under the name of each species, first a list of localities in which it has been found, often extending, quite unnecessarily in the case of common species, to six or seven lines, followed by an indication of the kind of situations in which it is to be met with, and a statement of the period of the year at which the insect appears in the perfect state. Then comes a short description of the caterpillar, with a statement of the time of its appearance, and of the plant on which it feeds, and the position in which the chrysalis may be found. Each of these pieces of information is put into a separate paragraph, by which means, and by the use of unnecessary words, considerable space which might be otherwise usefully employed is wasted. But in many cases we don't get even this amount of information, and a great number of the smaller species are dismissed after the following fashion (vol. iv., p. 137) :—
" Localities for this species are Hastings and Folkestone.
The perfect insect appears in June. It feeds on the Saltwort (Salsola Kali),"— which the perfect insect certainly does not. The absurdity of the strict adoption of a certain form, upon which the author seems to plume himself, is particularly obvious when we come upon a species which has occurred only in a single place, and read, "The localities for this species are near Bristol," or "near Torquay," or "at Forest Hill," or "at Askham Bog, near York ;" and then again, of some commoner species, "The situations where it is found are ponds" or "gardens," and these phrases are repeated again and again for each species. There is very little of the natural history of British moths in all this. Scarcely a word about the habits of the insects, except just the notices of the food plants and of the situation in which the moths and their chrysalids may be met with,—not a word about peculiar habits, such as the leaf-rolling proclivities of the Tortricine larvm, or the leaf-mining and case-making industry of those of the nearly microscopic Tiucina ; and last, but not least, not a single classificational character of any description to indicate to the student upon what grounds the various genera and families here adopted are distinguished from each other. Truly, from an educational point of view, Mr. Morris's work is a very had one, and even as a mere collector's book it is not of a high order. Pretentious in its title, pretentious in the style in which it is got up, and inexpressibly puerile in its execution, it is just such a work as any schoolboy collector might produce by taking some generally received list of British moths, copying out the names and tacking on to each such particles of information as
we have indicated above, which would cost, for the most part, only the labour of compilation, as they are to be found in
several well-known books. The sole redeeming feature of Mr. Morris's Natural History of British Moths is the goodness of the illustrations, for which, as we have hinted already, the author can claim but little credit.
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