INVESTIGATION OF INSECTS. 565 
sing you are acquainted with that common weevil Cionus 
Scrophularice, and find its near relation C. Blattarice ; 
instead of comparing it one by one with the 161 species 
which compose the Longirostres femoribus dentatis of the 
Fabrician genus Rhynchcemis in the Sy sterna Eleut/iera- 
torum, you would at once turn to the former, very near 
which you would without further trouble discover it. 
Fortunate would it be, could the Entomologist always 
depend on thus finding descriptions of allied species in 
the neighbourhood of each other ; but unhappily the 
most distinguished authors have sometimes violated this 
important rule, so that we cannot always be certain that 
any given species is not elsewhere described than in its 
right place. Fabricius in many instances often removes 
widely asunder insects not merely related, but which are 
in reality scarcely more than varieties of the same spe- 
cies a . In fact, the attention of this celebrated author 
was so distracted by the immensity of the materials he 
had to arrange, by the distance of the cabinets, in many 
cases, from each other, the new species of which he 
undertook to describe, and the rapidity with which they 
necessarily passed under his eye, that he seems never 
to have attained any nice perception of the affinities of 
insects. 
You must not conclude, however, that the investiga- 
tion of a new insect is even to an adept always a work of 
ease and dispatch. Often, when seemingly ascertained 
by the rapid process above indicated, a further inquiry 
a Thus he places Chlcenius holosericcEus and nigricornis, which might 
pass tor varieties, far asunder ; and Dromius agilis is even put in a 
different section from D. quadrimaculatus, tnmcatellus, &c. 
