prising, enabling him to effect many important improvements, and give a more explicit definition of groups and genera, particularly the latter. The zeal with which he laboured, for upwards of thirty years, to render the classification founded on this basis as perfect as possible, travelling into most of the countries of Europe in order to examine collections and describe new species, as well as its intrinsic merits, all tended to give considerable celebrity to the Fabrician arrangement.[1]
But whatever merits these and other methods, into the consideration of which we cannot now enter, may possess, they are all artificial; or if at any time, in certain of their subordinate parts, they make an approach to the natural system, it is rather the result of accident than the object at which they aim. To Latreille almost exclusively is to be ascribed the praise of having applied the principles of the natural system to insects, and this he did for the first time in the work mentioned above. So early as 1689, the celebrated A. L. Jussieu had applied them, with the most fortunate results, to the vegetable kingdom; and others were labouring with the same view in several of the higher departments of zoology,[2] Indeed, the conviction had
- ↑ See Latreille's Life of Fabricius, in the Ann. du Mus. d'Hist. Nat., 1808, t. xi. p. 393.
- ↑ Among others, Scopoli, whose idea of a natural method in insects was well expressed so early as 1775: "Classes et genera naturalia, non sola instrumenta cibaria, non solæ, alæ, nec solæ antennæ constituunt, sed structura totius ac cujusque vel
