554 A CENTURY OF PROGRESS IN THE NATURAL SCIENCES 



reverse of that in the mammals or DrosopMla, is a field for investigation. 

 The nature of the species barrier is also a subject for study, through the 

 various known and suspected "Rassenkreise," where one can say a population 

 is a single species, or two, according to where in its distribution area it is 

 studied. Goldschmidt has already studied the gypsy moth, in which the mechan- 

 ism of sex determination is involved, but no one has touched Utetheisa (one spe- 

 cies in the "West Indies, two from Kansas to Texas) or the buckeye (one species 

 in Mexico, two in Florida and Cuba). Biological rather than racial speciation 

 is an open question in Phyciodes tharos and P. hatesi, Piei'is oleracea and P. 

 virginiensis, Halysidota tessellaris and H. harrisii, in the oleaceous-feeding or 

 Triosteum-ieeding strains of Adita chionanthi, in the legume-feeding Thanaos 

 haptisiae and T. afranius against the columbine-feeding T. lucilius and the sali- 

 eaceous-feeding T. persius, and in many others. 



Then there is enormous opportunity for biology in the truer sense, the study 

 of living life : natural history, life histories of individual kinds, the interaction be- 

 tween any species and its environment, the seasons of species and strains, also 

 behavior, and the like. This field has degenerated terribly in the last half of our 

 century, largely, I believe, because so few people have the leisure to sit down and 

 observe and so few live close enough to nature to be able to do so. Moreover, the 

 study of the interaction between living creatures and their environment has 

 become more and more sterile ever since it was christened "ecology." There are 

 far more people who merely go through an area picking up and counting what 

 they happen to find than there are people who know what even the commoner 

 species are actually doing there. 



So much for what the next half-century can find to do. When one tries to 

 judge what it will actually be able to accomplish, one comes to the question of 

 means. And this seems to depend on three main items: location, leisure, and 

 money. There are certain things that money and only money can do, and the 

 chief of these is publication. There is always room for notes, but public sale 

 will not finance manuals, lists, compendia, and monographs in a field of few 

 workers like entomology. These must be financed or research will cease for lack 

 of record of discoveries. I got a bad shock a few months ago when the announce- 

 ment of a large amount of money for research stated inconspicuously near the 

 bottom that this money was not available for publication. If we are to have 

 manuals, faunal lists, and integrated surveys of biological work, the money for 

 publication must be earmarked before the work is started and must not be di- 

 verted. I know personally of three faunal lists that failed to appear after many 

 hours of work, because the publication fund had vanished during the period of 

 preparation. Also, five of the seven or eight missing volumes of Noctuidae of the 

 Catalogue of the Lepidoptera Phalaenae, were actually prepared, but after the 

 First World War there were no funds for printing. (I have been told that 

 nomenclatural questions were also involved, but the part that was questioned 

 for this reason was the only part actually published ! ) I therefore believe that 

 the people who have control of research money, should use some of it for this 

 type of work, and should guarantee the publication if the work is actually pre- 

 pared in a period at all reasonable. 



The other necessary factor is leisure, and this is a sociological problem, for 

 which some of the foundations bear a heavy responsibility. For they have issued 



