552 INVESTIGATION OF INSEC!'S. 
sing you are acquainted with that common weevil Rhyn- 
chenus Scrophularie F.(Cionus Latr.), and find its near 
relation FR. Blattarie F.; instead of comparing it one 
by one with the 161 species which compose his Lon- 
girostres femoribus dentatis of that genus in the Systema 
Lleutheratorum, you would at once turn to the former, 
very near which you would without further trouble dis- 
cover it. Fortunate would it be, could the Entomo- 
logist always depend on thus finding descriptions of 
allied species in the neighbourhood of each other; but 
unhappily the most distinguished authors have sometimes 
violated this important rule, so that we cannot always be 
certain that any given species is not elsewhere deseribed 
than in its right place. Fabricius in many instances 
often removes widely asunder insects not merely related, 
but which are in reality scarcely more than varieties of 
the same species?. In fact, the attention of this cele- 
brated author was so distracted by the immensity of the 
materials he had to arrange, by the distance of the ca- 
binets, in many cases, from each other, the new spe- 
cies of which he undertook to describe, and the rapidity 
with which they necessarily passed under his eye, that 
he seems never to have attained any nice perception of 
the affinities of insects. 
You must not conclude, however, that the investiga- 
tion of a new insect is even to an adept always a work of 
ease and dispatch. Often, when seemingly ascertained 
by the rapid process above indicated, a further inquiry 
will be requisite ; the more detailed description must be 
” Thus be places Chlenia holosericea and nigricornis, which might 
pass for varieties, far asunder; and Dromia agilis is even put in a 
different section from D. quadrimaculata, truncatella, &c. 
