COLEOPTEBOTTS INSECTS. 
91 
might be supposed to have an influence on animals, 
present the most striking differences in their insect 
productions. Latreille has observed that the coun- 
tries most fruitful in insects, are those in which 
vegetation is richest and most speedily renewed. 
South America, which is so prolific in 
all rare and beauteous tilings that fly 
Through the pure element, 
furnishes a greater number of Coleoptera than any 
other country. It comprehends every variety of 
soil and climate, and offers all the other conditions 
that tend to the increase of organized beings. Its 
intertropical regions are watered by many sea-like 
rivers, and clothed with a luxuriance of vegetation 
scarcely equalled elsewhere ; its mountain ranges, 
rising far above the limit of perpetual snow, are the 
sources of endless variation in climate and temper- 
ature ; its elevated plateaus enjoy the temperate air 
of a northern latitude, while the climates of Spain, 
Italy, and France, and even of Norway and Sweden, 
are successively presented to us in our progress to- 
wards the Straits of Magalhaens. Extensive wastes 
of arid sand likewise occur, similar to those that 
cover so large a portion of the African continent ; 
and the Pampas or Llanos (levels) stretching in a 
dead flat, like the illimitable expanse of the ocean, 
over an extent of country equal to a fourth part of 
Europe, and so far removed, in their untrodden so- 
litudes, from the turmoil of ordinary scenes, that 
by the earliest European visitors they were styled, 
