MEMOIR OF LATREILLE. 23 
prising, enabling him to effect many important 
improvements, and give a more explicit definition 
of groups and genera, particularly the latter. The 
zeal with which he laboured, for upwards of thirty 
years, to render the classification founded on this 
basis as perfect as possible, travelling into most 
of the countries of Europe in order to examine 
collections and describe new species, as well as its 
intrinsic merits, all tended to give considerable cele- 
brity to the Fabrician arnmgement. * 
But whatever merits these and other methods, 
into the consideration of which we cannot now 
enter, may possess, they are all artificial ; or if at 
any time, in certain of their subordinate parts, they 
make an approach to the natural system, it is rather 
the result of accident than the object at which they 
aim. To Latreille almost exclusively is to be as- 
cribed the praise of having applied the principles of 
the natural system to insects, and this he did for 
the first time in the work mentioned above. So 
early as 1689, the celebrated A. L. Jussieu had 
applied them, with the most fortunate results, to 
the vegetable kingdom ; and others were labouring 
with the same view in several of the higlier depart- 
ments of zoology, t Indeed, the conviction had 
* See Latreille's Life of Fabricius, in the Ann. du Mus. 
d'Hist. Nat., 1808, t. xi. p. 393. 
+ Among others, ScopoU, whose idea of a natural method in 
insects was well expressed so early as 1775 : " Classes et ge- 
nera naturalia, non sola instrumenta cibaria, non solae a?«, nee 
solae antenncB constituunt, sed structura totius ac cujusque rel 
