INTRODUCTORY REMARKS, 

 absolutely invisible, or next to it ; and for the sake 

 of systematic confusion has discarded nature and 

 all orderly arrangement, and instead of facilitating, 

 has perplexed the study of entomology with diffi- 

 culties that are innumerable and inextricable (/). 

 The rage of the present unhappy aera is not for the 

 amendment or improvement of what has been done 



(i) If the reader will take the trouble to turn over the Sup- 

 plement to the Entomologia Systematica, he will be convinced 

 that tlie language here employed is far from being too strong. 

 He wiU there see, to use an emphatic phrase, omnia misccri. 

 Instead of a regular and harmonious system, like that of Lin- 

 neus, a Babel of confasion and division. Instead of a gradual 

 descent towards those insects which nature has placed next to 

 the Vermes, he will find many of these stationed before the 

 Lepidoptcra ! ! For instance, after the Coleoptera and a few 

 genera of Hem iptera, come some of the Neuroptera and Aptera 

 mixed together ; these are followed by the Hymenoptcra, which 

 precede more Neuroptera. Then appear five classes oi Aptera, 

 the two last of which are made entirely out of the Linnean 

 genus Cancer, divided into twentij-seveji genera ! ! ! These are 

 succeeded by tlie Lepidoptera, followed by the rest of the He^ 

 miptera ; and the discordant catalogue, Partlum inter se nan 

 bene cohcerentium, concludes with Diptera and Aptera. If he 

 turns his attention from the classification to the genera, he will 

 be surprized to see families of the same natui'al genus forced 

 violently asunder, arid separated widely from each other. Thu3 

 Tricldiis, Cetonia, and Melulontha, disunited from Scaralrvus, to 

 which God and Nature had joined them, are placed next before 

 Buprestis. Again^ he will there see Fabricius deserting his own 

 system, and taking the Artificial Characters of no fewer than 

 twentij^one genera in his K/eistagnatha and Exochnata classes 

 from tlie Ante7m(B solely, without making any mention of the 

 instrnmeiUa ciharia, upon which it is founded. 



B 4 before^ 



