90 CONCLUDING REMARKS. 



raologist than on any distinctions made by Nature. He 

 indeed, who flatters himself with the idea that the families, 

 tribes, genera, and sections, which he has laid down on 

 paper are so many natural divisions, can only be compared 

 to the person who, because he may find the meridians and 

 other circles of an armillary sphere convenient for the 

 division of the heavens, should therefore imagine that they 

 must exist in nature. In one and the other case artificial 

 modes of distribution are resorted to, which, however inge- 

 nious in themselves, are but sad proofs of the limited state 

 of our faculties, when we consider that without such 

 instruments the vastness and sublimity of the Creation 

 cannot be comprehended. 



But it may be objected, that since families are artificial 

 there ceases to be a farther use for them in any system pro- 

 fessing to be natural : the same however may be said of ge- 

 nera, which, when they are not osculant, experience proves 

 to be even more artificial than families : — yet of what as- 

 tonishing service has the institution of genera been to our 

 knowledge of the creation a ! It is not the use of families or 

 genera that is hurtful to science, but the bending of Nature 

 to enter by force into these several divisions of our own 

 invention, which we are always induced to do the moment 

 we deceive ourselves and imagine them to be natural. 



The foregoing families I do not offer therefore as groups 

 precise and well defined; nay, such I conceive it impossible 

 to make : but if they can be imagined as each containing 

 a peculiar type of formation, to which all in it are in some 



a It will however be easily seen from the foregoing pages, that I by no 

 means subscribe to the doctrine, that " generum characteribus fixis tota 

 nititur scientia entomologica." Phil. Ent, 88. 



