SCIENTIFIC CULTIVATION OF BRITISH BEES. 145 
liis looking around for guides to their methodical ar¬ 
rangement, as a clue to what might have been observed 
of their habits. Finding no such assistance, and no¬ 
thing to meet his wants, for Linnaeus's notices were too 
few, and Fabricius’s labours too inconsequential, he de¬ 
termined to aid himself bv elaborating their distribution 
upon the basis of the principles established by Fabricius 
himself, but which this celebrated entomologist had worked 
out so inconclusively as to make his system an indigested 
v v O 
mass heaped together in the greatest disorder, 
Mr. Kirby’s patience and diligence, although working 
only upon the same principle, speedily brought into 
lucidity and order the obscurity and confusion that had 
prevailed. By one of those strange coincidences which 
have been remarkably recurrent in scientific invention 
and discovery, Latreille, in France, was at the same 
time arranging all the bees known to him, by a process 
precisely similar to that adopted by Mr. Kirby. He 
consequently arrived at exactly the same results, with 
this difference only, that what Mr. Kirby calls genera 
are to Latreille sub-families, and the sections which 
Mr. Kirby was induced to form in his genera, from 
their structural differences, and which sections he called 
families, inconveniently indicating them merely by 
letters, asterisks, and numbers, were formed by Latreille 
into genera, and to which the latter either applied or 
adopted names, or framed new ones, when deficient; these 
however are essentially genera, with all their discrimina¬ 
tive characteristics, for they bring together the very same 
species in both cases. This clearly exhibits the beauty 
and certainty of the principle upon which each had 
worked out his distribution, both being based chiefly 
upon the structure of the trophi, or the organs of the 
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