SCIENTIFIC CULTIVATION OF BRITISH BEES. 145 



his looking around for guides to their methodical ar- 

 rangement, as a clue to what might have been observed 

 of their habits. Finding no such assistance, and no- 

 thing to meet his wants, for Linnajus's notices were too 

 few, and Fabricius's labours too inconsequential, he de- 

 termined to aid himself by elaborating their distribution 

 upon the basis of the principles established by Fabricius 

 himself, but which this celebrated entomologist had worked 

 out so inconclusively as to make his system an indigested 



/ V 



mass heaped together in the greatest disorder. 



Mr. Kirby's patience and diligence, although working 

 only upon the same principle, speedily brought into 

 lucidity and order the obscurity and confusion that had 

 prevailed. By one of those strange coincidences which 

 have been remarkably recurrent in scientific invention 

 and discovery, Latreille, in France, was at the same 

 time arranging all the bees known to him, by a process 

 precisely similar to that adopted by Mr. Kirby. He 

 consequently arrived at exactly the same results, with 

 this difference only, that what Mr. Kirby calls genera 

 are to Latreille sub-families, and the sections which 

 Mr. Kirby was induced to form in his genera, from 

 their structural differences, and which sections he called 

 families, inconveniently indicating them merely by 

 letters, asterisks, and numbers, were formed by Latreille 

 into genera, and to which the latter either applied or 

 adopted names, or framed new ones, when deficient; these 

 however are essentially genera, with all their discrimina- 

 tive characteristics, for they bring together the very same 

 species in both cases. This clearly exhibits the beauty 

 and certainty of the principle upon which each had 

 worked out his distribution, both being based chiefly 

 upon the structure of the trophi, or the organs of the 



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