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 speakjng, 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 Scarabceus, as left by Linnaeus, 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 Horce Entomologicce, 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- 



