26 MEMOIR OF LATREILLE. 



restraints by which human beings are usually influ- 

 enced, had now been completely thrown off, — 



" and the giant Frenzy, 



Uprooting empires with his whirlwind arm," 



threatened to involve all that adorns humanity in 

 one common ruin. Among the multitudes con- 

 demned to deportation, as it was called, Latreille 

 was included, and sent to prison at Bordeaux, till 

 the time should arrive for carrying his sentence into 

 effect. The incident, in itself so trivial, by which 

 he was saved from a fate to which so many others 

 as innocent as himself became victims, has been 

 often described, and it shows very strikingly on 

 how small a point the most important events may 

 turn. The surgeon who visited the jail where La- 

 treille was confined, one day observed him carefully 

 examining a small insect'"' which had found its way 



* The insect in question is the Neerobia ruficollls. It was 

 then esteemed rare, but is now known to occur not unfre- 

 quently in most parts of Europe, as well as in Africa and A sia. 

 It is frequently found in Britain : I have seen it in the neigh- 

 bourhood of Edinburgh, and have consequently described it in 

 the Entomologia Ediiiensis, from which work I shall transcribe 

 its generic and specific characters: — Necrobia (from vik^os 

 a carcass, and /3<o? life, living on dead bodies). Antennae the 

 length of the thorax, the basal joint robust, the six following 

 more slender, the third from the base rather longest, eighth, 

 ninth, and tenth cup-shaped, increasing in -width, terminal very 

 large, quadrate, with the angles rounded, and the apex some- 

 what oblique : palpi with the terminal joint longest, fusiform- 

 truncate: mandibles with a single tooth beneath the apex: 

 thorax rounded quadrate: elytra oval, truncated at the base: 



