196 Mr. Spuncr’s Monograph of the Genus Choleva. 
itis not likely that he would have objected to the division of 
the three just mentioned, now alone including twice as many 
species, into the 31 genera under which Fabricius has disposed 
them ; or even into a greater number, if sufficient and obvious 
generic characters could be selected. The botanist who recollects 
his own original feelings of repugnance to the Hedwigian sepa- 
ration of the Mosses, or the Acharian of the Lichens; or the 
. local entomologist who remembers what was his aversion to adopt 
many of the new genera of insects of modern authors until the 
inspection of foreign collections had enlarged his views— will see 
nothing unnatural, or injurious to the fame of his great master, 
in the supposition that thé arrangements of his vast mind were 
bounded by the extent of his experience, and proportionably 
contracted where his observations were few. : 
Whatever was the cause of Linné's instituting so few entomo- 
logical geuera, succeeding authors soon saw the necessity of in- 
creasing the number. Geoffroy was the first to attempt much in 
this way, and for the most part with success. But Fabricius is 
the author who has established the most new genera ; and if he 
had confined himself to improving the Linnean method, his ef- 
forts alone would by this time have brought Entomology to a high 
degree of perfection. Unhappily his notion that in insects the 
generic characters ought to be drawn, as they are in plants, from 
one class of organs only, and his ambition to be the founder 
of a new system, led him to build his genera upon parts which 
in nine cases out of ten it is impossible to see, and which, when 
seen, frequently do not afford characters so valuable as those 
which may be derived from more obvious organs. And it may 
be affirmed with perfect truth, that if Fabricius's generic charac- 
ters were stripped of those explanatory accessories which he did 
not admit to be essential to them, it would be next to impossible 
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