26 MEMOIR OF LATREILLE. 
restraints by which human beings are usually influ- 
enced, had now been completely thrown off, — 
" and the giant Frenzy, 
Uprooting empires with his whirlwind arm," 
threatened to involve all that adorns humanity in 
one common ruin. Among the multitudes con- 
demned to deportation, as it was called, Latreille 
was included, and sent to prison at Bordeaux, till 
the time should arrive for carrying his sentence into 
effect. The incident, in itself so trivial, by which 
he was saved from a fate to which so many others 
as innocent as himself became victims, has been 
often described, and it shows very strikingly on 
how small a point the most important events may 
turn. The surgeon who visited the jail where La- 
treille was confined, one day observed him carefully 
examining a small insect* which had found its way 
* The insect in question is the Necrohia ruficoUis. It was 
then esteemed rare, but is now known to occur not unfre- 
quently in most parts of Europe, as well as in Africa and Asisb. 
It is frequently found in Britain : I have seen it in the neigh- 
bom-hood of Edinburgh, and have consequently described it in 
the Entomologia Edinensis, from which work I shall transcribe 
its generic and specific characters: — Necrobia (from nx^t 
a carcass, and (iieg life, living on dead bodies). Antennae the 
length of the thorax, the basal joint robust, the six following 
more slender, the third from the base rather longest, eighth, 
ninth, and tenth cup-shaped, uacreasing in width, terminal very 
large, quadrate, with the angles rounded, and the apex some- 
what oblique : palpi with the terminal joint longest, fusiform- 
truncate: mandibles with a single tooth beneath the apex: 
thorax rounded quadrate: elytra oval, truncated at the base: 
