A detailed account of the history of insect morphology and anatomy was presented by Gupta (1994).
Therefore the historical development will be outlined
only briefly here. The different meanings of the terms
morphology and anatomy were pointed out by Gupta
(1994), but without mentioning that “Morphologie”
was coined by the German poet Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe in 1779, and later independently by the German
anatomist Karl Friedrich Burdach in 1800. In contrast
to anatomy (Greek: aná=on,tomé=cut; investigation
of the shape structure, and position of organs or body
parts) morphology (Greek: morphé=form, shape,
lógos=word, teaching, ratio) always implies a comparative aspect and the concept of homology plays an
important role.