We share our luxury planet with a multitude of living things. To study them, it was necessary to classify them in an orderly system. The mammoth job was started in the 18th Century by the Swedish. scientist Carolus Linnaeus   who wrote his books and signed his name in Latin. His work is the basis for the scientific classification of plants and animals we still use.

The teeming world of living things is, of course, divided into the Plant Kingdom and the Animal Kingdom. Each kingdom is subdivided into a number of phyla, the plural of the word phylum which is derived from an older word meaning tribe. The members of a human tribe may be close kin or only remotely related, but they have certain features or customs in common. The members of an animal phylum may or may not be related, but they have certain outstanding features in common.

Insects, being animals, belong in the Animal Kingdom. They belong in the phylum Arthropoda, a scientific name coined from words meaning jointed foot. The arthropods have no bony internal skeletons and their bodies are supported by crusty shells and leathery jackets. In order for them to move there must be joints in their tough armor plating. Instead of knees and ankles, an insect have a number of elastic circles set into his leathery stockings. These are the joints of a typical arthropod.

Shrimps and lobsters, spiders and more than 700,000 other animals are also Arthropods and Arthropoda, largest of all phyla, is further subdivided into classes and subclasses. Insects belong in the class Insecta and they outnumber all other kinds of animals in the world.

Insecta is subdivided into 25 orders and the insects in each order have certain outstanding features in common.

The moths and butterflies belong in the order Lepidoptera, meaning scaly wings. All of them develop in four stages from egg to larva to pupa to adulthood. As adults, all have two pairs of large, velvety wings and mouths for sipping liquid food. The flies belong in the order Diptera, meaning two winged and they too develop in four stages. Grasshoppers and their kin belong in the order Orthoptera, meaning leathery wings. These fellows can chew their food, They start as miniature copies of their parents and grow in jerky stages by molting from a smaller coat to a larger one.

Countless insects are still waiting to be discovered. The newcomers are studied and classified in one of the 25 orders. A newcomer with four large velvety wings and a sipping type mouth, for example, would be placed in the order Lepidoptera,