x \[ PREFACE. 



eating Affinities and Analogies which is conceived to be applicable to the whole of organ- 

 izedmatter. The most comprehensive view that, in this world at least, man can ever take 

 of nature, must be but a glimpse of the reality, and must, consequently, be always sus- 

 ceptible of infinite improvement. As yet, moreover, we have not even arrived at the 

 threshold of nature's temple ; so that I shall have attained the utmost I can hope for, 

 if I should be found to have made a nearer approach to it, than had ever yet been made 

 in the same branch of entomology. The attention of naturalists in different countries, 

 andin widely different departments of Natural History, havinglately been turned towards 

 the laws which regulate the distribution of organized nature, and their works in general 

 being easily referred to, I shall not in this place enter into the theory. The staunch 

 partizans of Linnaeus, however,— those who account the Sy sterna A aturae to be Nature's 

 system, — will not be displeased to find, that in the following pages the Linnean genera 

 of Coleoptera, even those which, by Fabricius and Latreille, were most widely broken 

 asunder, now again become groupes, and this merely by following the Jilum ariad- 

 nceum of affinities, and certainly without any remarkable partiality on my part to the 

 learned Swede's character as an entomologist. It cannot, however, be denied, that 

 almost in every case his genera are natural groupes, although he erred in making 

 them all of the same rank, and appears to have had no idea whatever of the manner 

 in which they are connected. 



I have only now farther to observe, that it shall be my earnest endeavour to render 

 this work useful to persons resident in the Indian Archipelago, not merely by enabling 

 them to know the species they may meet with, and so to commence a science which 

 may eventually prove an agreeable source of amusement ; but by informing them of 

 the circumstances to which they ought to pay most attention, and thus making their 

 labours tend to the development of the plan of creation. 



My next and principal endeavour shall be not only to render the Javanese species 

 of Annulosa known to European collectors, but to shew the places which they respec- 

 tively occupy in the scale of created being. In the meanwhile let the young naturalist 

 bear in mind, that it is not the ready ability to give a name to an object, which ought 

 to be considered the grand, the ulterior aim, the " ultimus Jinis" of his observations, 

 but, as Linnaeus says, the discovery of the natural system ; and of this the meanest atom 

 that lives, the Monas itself, may perhaps form a link as necessary towards our proper 

 comprehension of the whole, as any other animal, however large, or however intelligent. 



