MEMOIR OF LATREILLE. 23 



prising, enabling him to effect many important 

 improvements, and give a more explicit definition 

 of groups and genera, particularly the latter. The 

 zeal with which he laboured, for upwards of thirty 

 years, to render the classification founded on this 

 basis as perfect as possible, travelling into most 

 of the countries of Europe in order to examine 

 collections and describe new species, as well as its 

 intrinsic merits, all tended to give considerable cele- 

 brity to the Fabrician arrangement. * 



But whatever merits these and other methods, 

 into the consideration of which we cannot now 

 enter, may possess, they are all artificial ; or if at 

 any time, in certain of their subordinate parts, they 

 make an approach to the natural system, it is rather 

 the result of accident than the object at which they 

 aim. To Latreille almost exclusively is to be as- 

 cribed the praise of having applied the principles of 

 the natural system to insects, and this he did for 

 the first time in the work mentioned above. So 

 early as 1689, the celebrated A. L. Jussieu had 

 applied them, with the most fortunate results, to 

 the vegetable kingdom ; and others were labouring 

 with the same view in several of the higher depart- 

 ments of zoology, t Indeed, the conviction had 



* See LatreihVs Life of Fabricius, in the Ann. da Mus. 

 d'Hist. Nat., 1808, t. xi. p. 393. 



•f Among others, Scopoli, whose idea of a natural method in 

 insects was well expressed so early as 1775 : " Classes et ge- 

 nera naturalia, non sola instrumenta cibcoia, non sola; alee, nee 

 solre antennae constituunt, sed stractura totius ac cujusque vel 



