452 BRITISH ENTOMOLOGY. 



Most of our readers are already aware of the painful subject 

 to which we allude ; it is one of those unwarrantable attacks 

 of one author on another which, for years past, have occa- 

 sionally disgraced the paths of science, and, in this instance, 

 it appears under the peculiarly aggravated circumstances of 

 being unfounded in truth, and perpetrated at a time when 

 misfortune had entitled the subject of the attack to universal 

 sympathy. 



Mr. Curtis has thought proper to publish, as an appendage 

 to a description of Cercojns, merely, as he says, because 

 " there is space for an observation or two," a charge against 

 Mr. Stephens, that, in the second edition of the Nomencla- 

 ture, he has " copied column after column from the Guide," 

 *' adopted the plan of the Guide," and made the Nomencla- 

 ture " rather a second edition of the Guide than of the No- 

 menclature : " than the first and last of these charges, we never 

 met with more gratuitous or untenable assertions : we pro- 

 nounce this after having compared the two works word for 

 word. With regard to the plan, i. e. in the addition of con- 

 secutive numbers to the genera and species, and the adoption 

 of the mode of printing, Mr. Stephens has, we are aware, 

 imitated ; he could not have done otherwise ; but in what 

 manner this is an injury to Mr. Curtis, we defy human inge- 

 nuity to point out. Is it not the every-day custom to adopt 

 any new mode or fashion in the getting up of a book ? The 

 only portions of the two works which bear any similarity are 

 those in which the Iclineumonhlce occur, and the cause of the 

 similarity here is, not that either has copied from the other, 

 but that both have copied from another work, " Gravenhorst's 

 Ichneumonologia," and this surely can be no just cause of 

 complaint ; the right of copying a foreign work cannot be con- 

 fined to a single individual. 



The cruel allusion to the affair with Rennie, — an affair which 

 ■we consider reflects any thing but credit on the laws of this 

 country, is the most unfeeling of all, and betrays a spirit of 

 deep-rooted animosity and revenge which lowers our opinion 

 of our kind. We presumed that the circumstances under 

 which Mr. Stephens was placed had rendered him an object 

 of kindly feeling with all scientific men ; we imagined that 

 self-respect would have prevented a Briton from striking 

 anotlier in distress ; we supposed British honour would have 



