SB The Irish Naturalist. [ March, 



nious party have been fuU^ recorded/ Among the noteworthy 

 utterances at that conference, I would recall and heartily wish 

 fulfilment to the hope expressed by the Hon. R. E. Dillon — 

 whose recent remarkable discoveries among the lepidopterawill 

 be fresh in all our minds — that Galway may soon have a Field 

 Club of its own. And I would also venture to echo Mr. F. J. 

 Bigger's hope that the Union may be the means of knitting 

 the various Clubs even closer together, until there shall be 

 but one Naturalists' Society for the entire country. The 

 mingling of the north and the south in the west, last July will, 

 we trust, have far-reaching and beneficial effects. None could 

 be present at such a gathering without realising the unity 

 which binds together the naturalists of the country, cheers 

 them for renewed effort, and makes them feel that all are 

 working towards the same great end. 



But is the end which field naturalists set before themselves 

 indeed great ? Who is the better or the wiser for knowing 

 that some weed or beetle has been found in a county — or an 

 island- -where it had not been found before? Or for being 

 able to decide whether the particles in a lump of clay were 

 dropped from an ice-berg, left by a glacier, or carried by a 

 current ? In a recent charming book^ one of our most eminent 

 English entomologists has expressed the wish that more field 

 naturalists would leave their records of " parochial distribu- 

 tion " and turn their attention to life-histories. It cannot be 

 denied that such a rebuke is timely ; and yet it is not the 

 study of parochial distribution, but the study of distribution 

 in a parochial spirit that deserves rebuke. The result 

 obtained by the man who, after 3^ears of patient research with 

 scalpel and microscope, calls up for us, from the vanished 

 ages of the past, the image of the ancestor of the vertebrates 

 or the arthropods '* in fashion as he lived," appeals to the 

 dullest mind as a veritable ''fairy-tale of science." But can 

 this be said of the product of the worker whose years of toil 

 are* rewarded by a list of long Eatin names, meaningless to 

 nine-tenths of the people who glance at them ? If the list 

 were the end, perhaps not. But each worker however humble, 

 at the flora or fauna of a district however small, may realise, 



* Irish Naturalist, vol. iv. (Sept. 1895). 



2 ly. C. Wi2\\,— Natural History of Aquatic Insects. I^ondon, 1895, 



