22 
WORK IN EUROPE 
ologist, with the defects of his character and the palpable limitations 
of his entomological talent , I mean to render him a better service 
than I should by feeble attempts at concealment and attenuation. 
After twenty-nine years of relations with him, I possess in his 
voluminous correspondence a source of information which enables 
me to accomplish this task better than anybody else, and I am con¬ 
vinced that I have fulfilled it with impartiality. 
The greatest difficulty, however, which I have had to overcome 
is that of speaking of myself. In a personal record like the present 
it is not easy to avoid the semblance of egotism. But I feel that, 
after the lapse of nearly half a century (for the beginning of my 
entomological career dates as far back as that), I have some right 
to look upon my former self as upon a different person. Not hav¬ 
ing had any training as a professional zoologist, I have always con¬ 
sidered myself a mere dilettante , and as such have always avoided 
going beyond my depth. My only purpose in working was to 
satisfy a natural wish to turn to some account my moderate abili¬ 
ties, to which fate had originally given a different, and to me dis¬ 
tasteful, direction. Sir M. Grant Luff (in an article on the Cretan 
question, Contemporary Review , April, 1897) says: “I once intro¬ 
duced an eminent Englishman to Jules Simon as a politician and 
an entomologist. ‘ La politique ,’ was the reply, ‘ Jest un peu de 
Ventomologies and so it is.” When I found myself figuring in 
both capacities (between 1871 and 1873), I gave up politics for 
entomology, and have never regretted it since. 
Ed. Perris wrote to Mulsant in the ominous year 1848: “La republique des 
lettres et le sooialisme des plantes sont les seuls auxquels je m’attache, et plus je 
m’aperfois que les homines ne valent pas grand’ehose, plus je me raccroche aux 
plantes et aux betes, aux betes surtout, si dociles h leur instinct, si fldeles a leur 
destinee.— Les gouvernements changent, mes occupations se multiplient; mes 
gouts ne se modifient pas. . . . .Te me trouve parfaitement bien d’echapper aux 
agitations dont les evenements politiques semblent avoir fait une necessite a 
la plupart des homines.” (Quoted by Laboulbene, in his obituary of E. Perris, 
in the Ann. Soc. Ent. France, 1879, p. 375.) 
I can say that in my new career which I embraced seriously 
rather late in life (in 1877, at the age of nearly fifty) I have done 
my best, and have succeeded sufficiently to satisfy my conscience. 
Honest criticism, tending to amend, or even to reverse, any of the 
