[2] Amédée Comte Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau (1769–circa 1850), author of an Histoire naturelle des insectes (1836–1846) and of the volume on insects in the Encyclopédie méthodique. He was a younger brother of Louis Michel and Félix Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau, the members of the Convention.—Translator’s Note. [↑]
[3] Jean Théodore Lacordaire (1801–1870), professor at the university of Liège from 1835, author of Les Genera des coléoptères, in twelve volumes, and of the Introduction à l’entomologie quoted above (1837–1839).—Translator’s Note. [↑]
[4] Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), the poet and naturalist, grandfather of Charles Robert Darwin. The book from which the above passage is quoted is Zoonomia, or, The Laws of Organic Life (1794–1796); but the reader will note that the author withdraws these comments in a later essay (cf. The Mason-bees, by J. Henri Fabre, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos: chap. vii.), where he explains that they are due to a misquotation or mistranslation made by Lacordaire, who wrote ‘a Sphex’ where Darwin, as his grandson pointed out to Fabre, had written ‘a Wasp,’ meaning the Common or Social Wasp. It was open to me to suppress this part of the chapter; but, in that case, there would have been so little left of the original and so small an excuse for the title that I might as readily have suppressed the whole chapter, a liberty which I did [[118]]not feel justified in taking. Besides, the footnote to the aforementioned chapter of The Mason-bees, which precedes the present volume in the English edition, makes sufficient amends for any injury done to the elder Darwin’s reputation here.—Translator’s Note. [↑]
‘The busy bees, with a soft murmuring strain,
Invite to gentle sleep the labouring swain.’—
Pastorals, i., Dryden’s translation. [↑]