INCONSISTENCY OF ARTIFICIAL SYSTEMS. 237. 
insects. Fabricius, on the other hand, as if de- 
termined to fly to the other extreme, takes all his. 
leading characters from those parts of insects which 
his great master regarded as insignificant. While 
some of the French naturalists, looking chiefly to 
the feet, built their systems on the number and 
form of the joints they contain. Whether an insect 
or a bird fed upon animal or vegetable food ; whether 
it lived upon the ground, or habitually avoided it; or 
whether it flew with celerity or with difficulty ; were 
matters which then had little or no influence in the 
determination of groups: indeed, they were almost 
thought too trivial to notice. True it is, that in 
very many instances, natural groups were still pre- 
served; but, generally speaking, as there were no 
determinate principles for classification, so there 
could be no uniformity of arrangement, or consis- 
tency of separation. The most heterogeneous com- 
binations, of course, resulted; of which the group 
of Scarabeus, as left by Linnzeus, and as still ex- 
hibited in more modern works, affords a striking 
instance. Compare these crude and almost unin- 
telligible arrangements of insects with the lucid, 
harmonious, and philosophical exposition of them 
given in the Hore Hntomologice, and the unpre- 
judiced entomologist will at once see the difference 
between arrangements which lead to nothing, and 
arrangements which are in harmony with the 
primary laws of nature. 
(163.) Now, the objections against different writers 
employing different characters for the same divisions, 
is not in the simple fact itself, but because they aim, 
at no other object than to abridge the labour of re- 
