INVESTIGATION OF INSECTS. 565 



sing you are acquainted with that common weevil Clonus 

 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 RhyncJicenus in the Sy sterna Eleuthera- 

 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 3 . 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 for varieties, far asunder ; and Dromius agUis is even put in a 

 different section from D. quadrimaculatus, truncaiellus t &c. 



