HISTORY OF ICHTHYOLOGY. 



61 



tion^ are too long to be inserted in this volume, but they 

 will be occasionally adverted to. The faults that have 

 been dwelt upon* in these two works are such as all 

 authors_, even M. Cuvier himself^ is not exempt from ; 

 they seem to us^ in short, too trivial for the notice of the 

 historian, and too general to be affixed to any one author 

 in particular. We freely admit that M. Rafinesque (then 

 living, as we were, in a remote part of Europe, cut off, 

 by the late war, from all intercourse with the Continent) 

 was not well informed upon the current and almost daily 

 discoveries going on there ; and that some few of his 

 species then supposed new, were really not so : but who 

 is exempt from such errors, if errors they are ? or how are 

 such coincidents to be prevented, when naturalists, in 

 distant places, and unknown to each others are working 

 at the same time upon the same subject ? On the other 

 handj it must not be concealed that M. Rafinesque an- 

 ticipated, by nearly ten years, a very large proportion of 

 the generic and sub-generic distinctions subsequently 

 taken up in the Regne Animal, in the first edition of 

 which it is clear that its learned author was totally 

 unacquainted with the works above mentioned, or 

 that he was unconsciously repeating, under new names^ 

 a considerable number of the genera and sub-genera 



* M. Cuvier observes : " He has, besides, entered in his catalogue, v/ith- 

 out examination, all the species given by Lacepede and Linnsus as belong- 

 ing to the Mediterranean, which has caused him to reckon several which 

 are purely imaginary ; and this extends even to his genera: thus, his Aodon, 

 taken from Lacepede, is the Raie cephaloiplhe ; his Macroj-amplms, taken 

 from the same source, is the Centrisms. He has greatly multiplied the 

 genera, and sometimes on slight grounds ; so that, without reckoning 

 those which are not inhabitants of the Mediterranean, there are 139; and 

 yet, notwithstanding his readiness to make these divisions, he has not 

 done so in circumstances in which it would be imperatively commanded by 

 the laws of classification. He leaves, lor instance, the anchovy in the 

 herring genus, and the plaice in that of the sole ; while of the single Lin- 

 nffian genus of Squalus he has made sixteen," " These two works are, 

 nevertheless," continues M. Cuvier, "very worthy of attention, on account 

 of some original ideas, and of descriptions and figures of the fishes them- 

 selves, which are to be found nowhere else. The author, also, has paid 

 attention to the Sicilian names of most of his species." If Rafinesque made 

 too many genera, M. Cuvier has nearly doubled them ; and as for the " laws 

 of classification," which imperatively command the formation of these 

 genera of M. Cuvier, the term is totally misapplied. Genera, like those of 

 Rafinesque and Cuvier, are mere matters of individual opiniuii, because 

 they are made without any ulterior reference, and are merely divisionsj 

 with which no laws of artificial classification have any thing to do. 



