PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. XV 
however, that I have not employed many technical terms, 
and that I have endeavoured to communicate my ideas with- 
out that barbarous apparatus of factitious words, which, in 
the works of so many modern naturalists, prove so very re- 
pulsive. I cannot perceive, however, that I have thereby 
lost any thing in precision or clearness. 
I have been compelled, unfortunately, to introduce many 
new names, although I endeavoured as far as possible to pre- 
serve those of my predecessors; but the numerous subgenera 
I have established required these denominations ; for in things 
so various the memory is not satisfied with numerical indica- 
tions. I have selected them, so as either to convey some 
character, or among the common names which I have latinized, 
or finally after the example of Linnzus, from those of mytho- 
logy, which are generally agreeable to the ear, and which we 
are far from having exhausted. 
In naming species, however, I would recommend employ- 
ing the substantive of the genus, and the trivial name only. 
The names of the subgenera are designed as a mere relief to 
the memory, when we wish to indicate these subdivisions in 
particular. Otherwise, as the subgenera, already very nu- 
merous, will in the end become greatly multiplied, in con- 
sequence of having substantives continually to retain, we shall 
be in danger of losing the advantages of that binary nomen- 
clature so happily imagined by Linneus. 
It is the better to preserve it that I have dismembered, 
as little as possible, the genera of that illustrious reformer of 
science. Whenever the subgenera in which I divide them 
were not to be translated to different families, I have left 
them together under their former generic appellation. This 
was not only due to the memory of Linnzeus, but it was ne- 
cessary in order to preserve the mutual intelligence of the 
naturalists of different countries. 
The habit, naturally acquired in the study of natural his- 
tory, of the mental classification of a great number of ideas, 
is one of the advantages of that science that is seldom observed, 
and which, when it shall have been generally introduced into 
