ANNULOSA JAVANICA. 



INTRODUCTION. 



As this Work is to be conducted with as much reference as possible to those general prin- 

 ciples of natural distribution which I have laid before the Public, both in the Horce Entomologies 

 and the Transactions of the Linnean Society, the reader may easily perceive that there will be 

 some novelty in the arrangement, as well as in the matter arranged. In abandoning, however, 

 that division of Coleoptera which is founded on the number of joints in the tarsi, and which has 

 acquired so much vogue on the Continent, it may be necessary to shew that I am countenanced 

 by some authority. I shall, for this purpose, therefore, content myself with citing the following 

 words of M. Latreille : that is, of the distinguished naturalist to whom the Tarsal System owes 

 much more of its celebrity than to its inventor. " Articulorum tarsorum progressio numerica 

 decrescens in methodo naturali non admittenda." — (Gen. Crust, et Ins. vol. i. p. 172.) 



It will also be seen that I commence with the Adephagous Coleoptera, not indeed because they 

 form a particularly rich part of the Hon. East-India Company's collection, and still less from any 

 notion of the Linnean genus Cicindela having a peculiar title to this pre-eminence, but because 

 they constitute that department of the science which at present most engages the attention of 

 Continental Entomologists. In the course of this investigation I shall have several new genera, 

 or rather subgenera, to propose, of which the characters in some cases must necessarily rest on 

 refined, and even minute considerations. Now, as the object I have in view is to make known 

 in a definite manner all the species that may be new, I cannot hope to carry this my intention 

 into execution without adopting some of those delicate distinctions, which result from the mode 

 of investigation that has lately been pursued by M. Bonelli, in his study of these insects. I 

 have, indeed, little choice to make : for I must either expose myself to a charge very frequently 

 at present brought against Entomologists— namely, that they disgust persons with the science 

 by the multitude of names with which they load it ; or I must display unpardonable ignorance of 

 the many excellent observations which could never have been discovered, nor can now be 

 explained, without such a mode of discrimination being resorted to. When, therefore, I venture 

 to add to the already overwhelming number of subgenera into which the Linnean genus Carabus 

 has been divided, I have to state in excuse, that this course of proceeding is adopted from the 

 conviction that it is impossible to assign some of the new Javanese forms to any of those genera, 

 which MM. Dejean and Bonelli have almost entirely founded on the examination of European 



B insects. 



