124 Mr. Spence’s Monograph of the Genus Choleva. 
a Variation in one essential character was deemed by Linné su fti- 
. cient to entitle a single plant to rank as a genus, he ought un- 
questionably to have followed the same rule in Entomology. 
Two solutions of this anomaly in the practice of our great head,, 
present themselves. One, that chiefly occupied with botanical 
labours,—labours of which a tithe might well have employed the 
life of any ordinary man,—he had not leisure to give equal per- 
fection to the other departments of natural history. The other, 
advanced by Fabricius in the preface to his first work the Systema 
Entomologie, and again repeated in his Philosophia Entomologica, 
that Linné, conscious of the imperfections and insufficiency of 
his entomological system, avoided the multiplication of genera, 
from fear of increasing that confusion which he was aware had 
in part arisen. — — ' 
The latter supposition, few but the devoted disciples of Fa- 
bricius will assent to. The former is more plausible, and is, in 
some measure, confirmed by the circumstance of Linné's having 
regarded natural families as genera in the Cryptogamic depart- 
ment of Botany, just as he has done in Entomology. 
"Ihe incorrectness of both conjectures, however, may be in- 
ferred from a passage in the Biga Insectorum, the last of Linné’s 
_entomological labours, and composed when old age had matured 
his judgement. In this work the following paragraph occurs: 
“ Plurima insectorum genera jam tum esse detecta, observamus, 
eorum consideratä historià. Dom. Doct. Thunberg, qui singu- 
larem omninó operam rebus impendit entomologicis, per literas 
commemorat, se sub triennii ad Caput Bone Spei vix ullum genus 
novum reperire potuisse ; et longius latiusque peregrinatus Dom. 
* «€ Perspexit perbene summus Vir defectum systematis in characteribus genericis, ideo- 
que rarissime nova genera condidit, ne e characteribus hisce vacillantibus accumulatis, 
major oriatur confusio," Syst, Ent, Prolegom. p. 9, See also Philos, Ent. p. 85 and 92, 
Doct. 
