NOTES ON COLLECTING. 185 



making, who have discovered subspecies, and are not satisfied with 

 varieties (local races) or aberrations, yet, who cannot point to a single 

 species, illustrations of which were made 200 or 300 years ago, in which 

 a single iota of change has taken place, who believe that species are as 

 artificial elements as genera, and who are willing to cry-down the 

 man who quietly asks for facts instead of froth, and definitions instead 

 of words. The question of species is as unsettled, as uncertain, as 

 elusive as ever. The factors that determine a physiological or 

 structural change, correlated with some external mark, feature, or 

 shade of colour, that usuallj^ stands for the specific character, are still 

 as far oft' as ever. We spend our lives in research, and spending them 

 thus know how little we have done. To the outsider it seems so much, 

 to the worker so little. In the whole lepidopterous fauna of England 

 there is no species of really uncertain limits, nor one in which the 

 peculiar features that stamp it "species" have been altered one iota 

 in at least our entomological historical time, and, although the 

 necessity for some superficial change, due to the exigencies of pro- 

 tection, has, comparatively recently, led to a greater range of 

 variation that we can see and measure, in some species, the 

 elements that mark them " species " remain unchanged. And, 

 in our experimental work, work done in the laboratory, where 

 we are supposed to be copying nature and attempting to unravel 

 here and there one of the many vital elements that go to 

 form the sum total of some organism, by eliminating as far as possible 

 anything happening under the stress of the experiment to other 

 elements, we have reached but a little way. The Mendelians only find 

 in one species a "law " that is upset by the next species experimented 

 upon, and so on through the whole gamut of our work. In becoming 

 ultra-scientific we often forget all about nature, and, after all, it is 

 what is done by nature, under natural conditions, that goes to the 

 making of the species as they exist in nature, and if our plea for more 

 real scientific natural history shall lead to more field observation, and 

 less of the artificial theorising into which we are being more or less 

 unwillingly dragged, we shall get nearer to an understanding of the true 

 nature of species, and an appreciation of the manifold elements that 

 must have accumulated through aeons of time to make the species just 

 what they are now and just what they seem to us. 



SCIENTIFIC NOTES AND^BSERYATIONS. 



Gynandromorphous Saturnia pavonia. — I bred a very remarkable 

 example of Saturiiia pavonia from a Bexley larva, in May last. The right 

 wings and right antenna are quite normal, S • The left forewing has 

 the upper half ? , the lower half ^ , whilst the left hindwing has also 

 the top half ? , the bottom half ^ , with, however, a few splashes of 

 2 colour in this 3' area. The ocellated spots on the " mixed " side 

 are larger than on the ^ side. The antenna on the left side is about 

 midway between the sexes. The abdomen is very large, but not so 

 large as that of a normal ? . — L. W. Newman, F.E.S., Bexley, Kent. 

 Jane 2Qth, 1909. 



:^OTES ON COLLECTING, Etc. 



Great abundance of larv.e of Hyponomeuta cagnagellus in 

 Lewisham. — Last year I remarked {antea, vol. xx., pp. 185, 216) the 



