midnight
It must not be supposed , however , that Cousin Benedict was either idle or unoccupied . On the contrary , his whole time was devoted to one absorbing passion for natural history . Not that he had any large claim to be regarded properly as a natural historian ; he had made no excursions over the whole four districts of zoology , botany , mineralogy , and geology , into which the realms of natural history are commonly divided ; indeed , he had no pretensions at all to be either a botanist , a mineralogist , or a geologist ; his studies only sufficed to make him a zoologist , and that in a very limited sense . No Cuvier was he ; he did not aspire to decompose animal life by analysis , and to recompose it by synthesis ; his enthusiasm had not made him at all deeply versed in vertebrata , mollusca , or radiata ; in fact , the vertebrata -- animals , birds , reptiles , fishes -- had had no place in his researches ; the mollusca -- from the cephalopoda to the bryozia -- had had no attractions for him ; nor had he consumed the midnight oil in investigating the radiata , the echmodermata , acalephæ , polypi , entozoa , or infusoria . No ; Cousin Benedict 's interest began and ended with the articulata ; and it must be owned at once that his studies were very far from embracing all the range of the six classes into which `` articulata '' are subdivided ; viz , the insecta , the mynapoda , the arachnida , the crustacea , the cinhopoda , and the anelides ; and he was utterly unable in scientific language to distinguish a worm from a leech , an earwig from a sea-acorn , a spider from a scorpion , a shrimp from a frog-hopper , or a galley-worm from a centipede . To confess the plain truth , Cousin Benedict was an amateur entomologist , and nothing more . Entomology , it may be asserted , is a wide science ; it embraces the whole division of the articulata ; but our friend was an entomologist only in the limited sense of the popular acceptation of the word ; that is to say , he was an observer and collector of insects , meaning by `` insects '' those articulata which have bodies consisting of a number of concentric movable rings , forming three distinct segments , each with a pair of legs , and which are scientifically designated as hexapods .