Our Common Insects
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Popular-science readers interested in insects and natural history who are willing to read original English texts
- Students and scholars studying 19th-century natural-history writing and the popular-science genre
- English learners who need free public-domain English texts for extensive reading or excerpt-translation practice
- Digital-reading enthusiasts collecting Project Gutenberg zoology e-books
Not a good fit for
- Practical readers seeking modern insect classification and identification methods
- Beginners who find English reading difficult and need sentence-by-sentence Chinese support
- Readers expecting many color plates or field-identification illustrations
Reading tips
- Read the table of contents and chapter subheadings first, then start with an insect group you already know rather than plowing straight through.
- Keep a modern entomology glossary at hand; mark old taxonomic names as you go and revisit them after finishing the book.
- Copy out passages you like for English imitation writing or translation practice, combining language work with natural-history knowledge.
- Read it alongside other public-domain natural-history works to compare the common features of popular science writing of the period and the author's individual style.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33
- 34
- 35
- 36
- 37
- 38
- 39
- 40
- 41
- 42
- 43
FAQ
Is this book suitable for use as an insect identification manual?
How difficult is the original English?
What should I keep in mind when reading it as a free e-book?
Comments
Find this book
This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.
About the author
Alpheus Spring Packard (1839–1905) was an American entomologist and paleontologist. He devoted himself to the study of North American insects and fossil animals and wrote a number of works on zoology. Two of his books are included here: Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution and Our Common Insects. The former discusses Lamarck, a pioneer of evolutionary thought, while the latter introduces common insects to general readers, reflecting his tendency to combine specialist research with popular science writing. Public information about the details of his life is limited, yet his surviving works show that he balanced scholarly discussion with the dissemination of natural history knowledge, leaving writings in both entomology and paleontology and contributing to the popularization of these fields.
