Xi PREFACE. 
gating Affinities and Analogies which is conceived to be applicable to the whole of organ- 
izedmatter. The most comprehensive view that, in this world at least, man can evertake 
of nature, must be but a glimpse of the reality, and must, consequently, be always sus- 
ceptible of infinite improvement. As yet, moreover, we have not even arrived at the 
threshold of nature’s temple ; so that I shall have attained the utmost I can hope for, 
if I should be found to have made a nearer approach to it, than had ever yet been made 
in the same branch of entomology. ‘The attention of naturalists in different countries, 
andin widely different departments of Natural History, having lately been turned towards 
the laws which regulate the distribution of organized nature, and their works in general 
being easily referred to, I shall not in this place enter into the theory. The staunch 
partizans of Linneus, however,—those who account the Systema Nature to be Nature’s 
system,—will not be displeased to find, that in the following pages the Linnean genera 
of Coleoptera, even those which, by Fabricius and Latreille, were most widely broken 
asunder, now again become groupes, and this merely by following the filum ariad- 
neum of affinities, and certainly without any remarkable partiality on my part to the 
learned Swede’s character as an entomologist. It cannot, however, be denied, that 
almost in every case his genera are natural groupes, although he erred in making 
them all of the same rank, and appears to have had no idea whatever of the manner 
in which they are connected. 
I have only now farther to observe, that it shall be my earnest endeavour to render 
this work useful to persons resident in the Indian Archipelago, not merely by enabling 
them to know the species they may meet with, and so to commence a science which 
may eventually prove an agreeable source of amusement; but by informing them of 
the circumstances to which they ought to pay most attention, and thus making their 
labours tend to the development of the plan of creation. 
My next and principal endeavour shall be not only to render the Javanese species 
of Annulosa known to European collectors, but to shew the places which they respec- 
tively occupy in the scale of created being. In the meanwhile let the young naturalist 
bear in mind, that it is not the ready ability to give a name to an object, which ought 
to be considered the grand, the ulterior aim, the ‘ wtimus finis’”’ of his observations, 
but, as Linnzeus says, the discovery of the natural system ; and of this the meanest atom 
that lives, the Monas itself, may perhaps form a link as necessary towards our proper 
comprehension of the whole, as any other animal, however large, or however intelligent. 
