restraints by which human beings are usually influenced, had now been completely thrown off,—
————"and the giant Frenzy,
Uprooting empires with his whirlwind arm,"
threatened to involve all that adorns humanity in one common ruin. Among the multitudes condemned to deportation, as it was called, Latreille was included, and sent to prison at Bordeaux, till the time should arrive for carrying his sentence into effect. The incident, in itself so trivial, by which he was saved from a fate to which so many others as innocent as himself became victims, has been often described, and it shows very strikingly on how small a point the most important events may turn. The surgeon who visited the jail where Latreille was confined, one day observed him carefully examining a small insect[1] which had found its way
- ↑ The insect in question is the Necrobia ruficollis. It was then esteemed rare, but is now known to occur not unfrequently in most parts of Europe, as well as in Africa and Asia. It is frequently found in Britain: I have seen it in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, and have consequently described it in the Entomologia Edinensis, from which work I shall transcribe its generic and specific characters:—Necrobia (from νεκρος a carcass, and βιος life, living on dead bodies). Antennæ the length of the thorax, the basal joint robust, the six following more slender, the third from the base rather longest, eighth, ninth, and tenth cup-shaped, increasing in width, terminal very large, quadrate, with the angles rounded, and the apex somewhat oblique: palpi with the terminal joint longest, fusiform-truncate: mandibles with a single tooth beneath the apex: thorax rounded quadrate: elytra oval, truncated at the base:
