160 DUBLIN UNIVERSITY 



content myself with a few casual hints on what a student should avoid, 

 and what he may best pursue. Young observers are very apt to imagine 

 that every varying form of animal or plant that presents itself is speci- 

 fically different from the type from which it varies ; and, in a limited 

 locality, and with limited experience of variations, mistaken notions of 

 species almost of necessity arise. This, which is true of young observers 

 in almost every country, applies with equal force to older observers, who 

 confine their labours to the contents of a single area. Hence, we find 

 that a large per-centage of the bad species that incumber books of sys- 

 tematic botany have been introduced by authors acquainted only with 

 the plants of the country they inhabited or described. The same plant 

 occurring in different countries has acquired a different name in each, 

 and thus a large synonymy has grown up to incumber the science. 

 Many plants have a dozen, and several have twenty names, under which 

 they are known in different places. The common Bracken (Pteris aqui- 

 lina) is a well-known instance, not to speak of the bramble (Rubus fru- 

 tieosus), whose name in many modern books is truly Legion. I doubt 

 not that all departments of zoology would afford equally striking instances 

 of redundancy, and therefore I would caution young observers not to be 

 too hasty in proposing new names, and, above all, would impress upon 

 them that the discovery of new species is not by any means the most 

 important work of a naturalist. It is indeed right that we should know 

 all the species in our Fauna and Flora, and therefore any novelty has a 

 definite value ; but the value of a new species, though always definite, 

 is often small — as in cases where it is a mere addition of specific form, 

 without perceptibly influencing the limits of a higher generalization — 

 and at best the discovery of a species is the least fact in connexion with 

 it. The man who claimed to have first observed the comet in England 

 (you may have seen his strangely mis-spelt letter in the " Times") has 

 certainly a degree of merit, but of a very different order from that of an 

 astronomer who, by observing its path through a few constellations, can 

 predict its times and seasons, and point out the whole of its course 

 through space. Thus the man who first finds a new species deserves one 

 kind of praise, and he who demonstrates its affinities or traces its deve- 

 lopment deserves another, and a far higher kind. A clown may pick up 

 a nugget ; none but a prince can transform it into a guinea. Any one 

 may find any number of species; none but a naturalist can convert them 

 into capital. 



