Ebook: An Atlas of Insect Morphology

Scan of "An Atlas of Insect Morphology". Image format (not textual/OCR).

The book consists exclusively of illustrations of external anatomy and their labels. It includes over 700 detailed diagrams.

"PREFACE
The principal aim of the present atlas is to survey insect morphology as far as the imago's exoskeleton is concerned. Many books of a similar nature have appeared in the past, and though the subject is the same the treatment of our attempt is different. Most authors on insect morphology wrote descriptive works with a wealth of informa-tion hidden in the text thereby necessitating that students interested in the superficial characteristics of a particular insect group should delve into voluminous books to select terminology for their special purpose. But since insects are so extremely variable in form, in the majority of cases the selection of the precise term to describe any particular feature presents quite a task. To further aggravate the problem many an author coined new words either to substitute older ones or to provide a name for a skeletal characteristic previously unnamed. Thus, there are scarcely any two works using identical terminology. One of the most comprehensive works in the recent literature is the two volumes (the head and the thorax) of Matsuda, whose great merit is that he attempted to homologize insect morphology. Even so his books are basically descriptive presenting at the same time a string of arguments and counter-arguments to support the validity of one or another technical term, in many instances coining new ones, thereby once again rendering orientation difficult. The majority of the figures have been adapted from literature sources, on the other hand, many have been newly designed, especially when illustrating homologized body regions: the reason for this approach was to convey the meaning in a simplified form.
-The Authors"