Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/583

Rh It is time to ask, with all his talents and prodigious application, what did he leave to science? This is best answered by an examination of the 'Biblia Naturaæ’ into which alt his work was collected. His treatise on 'Bees and Mayflies' and a few other articles were published during his lifetime, hut a large part of his observations remained entirely unknown until they were published in this book fifty-seven years after his death. In the folio edition it embraces 410 pages of text and fifty-three plates, replete with figures of original observations. It "contains about a dozen life-histories of insects worked out in more or less detail. Of these, the Mayfly is the most famous; that on the honeybee the most

elaborate." The greater amount of his work was in structural entomology. It is known that he had a collection of about 3,000 different species of insects, which for that period was a very large one. There is, however, a considerable amount of work on other animals: the fine anatomy of the snail, structure of the clam, the squid; observations on the structure and development of the frog: observations on the contraction of muscles, etc., etc.

It is to be remembered that Swammerdam was extremely exact in all that he did. His descriptions are models of accuracy and completeness.