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Show XX PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. animals. Since the publication of the celebrated work of M. de Lacepede, the accession to our Museum of a great number of fishes, has enabled me to add several subdivisions to those of that learned naturalist, to form different combinations of several species, and to multiply anatomical observations. I have also had better means of verifying the species of Commerson and of some other travellers, and on this point I owe much to a review of the drawings of Commerson and of the dried fishes he brought with him, by M. Dumeril, which have been but very lately recovered: resources to which I added those presented to me in the fishes brought by Peron from the Indian Ocean and Archipelago; those which I collected in the Mediterranean, and the collections made on the coast of Coromandel by the late M. Sonnerat, at the Isle of France by M. Mathieu, in the Nile and Red Sea by M. Geoffroy, &c. I was thus en~bled to verify most of the species of Bloch, Russel, and others, and to have prepared the skeletons and viscera of nearly all the subgenera, so that this portion of the work will, I presume, present to icthyologists much that is new. As to my division of this class, I confess its inconvenience, but I still think it more natural than any preceding one. When I :first published it, I gave it, quantum valeat, and if any one discovers a better principle of division, and. as conformable to the organization, I shall hasten to adopt it. It is well known that all the works, on the general division of the Invertebrated animals, are mere modifications of what I proposed in 1795 in the first of my memoirs ; and the time and care I have devoted to the anatomy of the Mollusca in general, and principally to the naked Mollusca, are equally so. The determining of this class, as well as of fts divisions and subdivisions, rests on my observations; the magnificent work of M. Poli had alone anticipated me by descriptions and anatomical researches, useful to me it is true, '(;)ut confined to bivalves and multivalves only. I have verified all the facts furnished to me by that able anatomist, and I have, I think, more justly marked the functions of some organs. I have also en~eavoured to determine the animals to which the principal PllEFACE TO TilE FIRST EDITION. xxi forms of shells belong, and to arrange the latter from that consideration; but as to the ulterior divisions of those shells whose animals resemble each other, I have examined them only so far as to enable me to describe those admitted by Messrs de Lamarck and de Montfort; even the small number of genera or subgenera which are properly mine, are derived from observations on the animals. In citing examples I have confined myself to a certain number of the species of Martini, Chcmnitz, Lister, and that only (the volume of M. de Lamarck, which is to contain these matters, not being published), because I was compelled to fix the attention of the reader on specific objects. In the selection and determining of these species however I lay no claim to the same critical accuracy I have employed for the Vertebrated animals and the naked Mollusca. The excellent observations of Messrs Savigny, Lesueur, and Desmarest on the compound Ascidia, approximate the latter family of the Mollusca to certain orders of Zoophytesa curious relation, and an additional proof of the impracticabi1ity of arranging animals on one single line. The Annulata (the establishing of which order, although not the name, belongs de facto to me) have I think been extricated from the confusion in which they had hitherto been involved among the Mollusca, the Testacea, and the Zoophytes, and placed in their natural order-even their genera have been elucidated only by my observations on them, published in the'' Dictionnaire des Sciences Naturelles," and elsewhere. I can say nothing relative to the three classes contained in the third volume. M. Latreille, who, with the exception of some anatomical details, founded on my own observations and those of M. Randohr, added to his text, is its sole author, will spare me that trouble. As to the Zoophytes, which terminate the animal kingdom, I have availed myself, for the Echinodermata, of the late work of M. de Lamarck, and for the Intestinal Worms, of that of M. Rudolphi, entitled Entozoa; but I have anatomized all the genera, some of which have been determined by me only. |