SOCIETIES. 67 



It has, for a long timo past, happened that the great mass of 

 material collected has found its way into the hands of the authorities of 

 our Museums, and hence a very large percentage of insects have been 

 named l)y the entomologists attached thereto. It happens also, that, 

 owing to the nature of such ai)pointments, the jiersons selected for the 

 work have usually had no special training. Prentice hands are there- 

 fore always at work on subjects requiring a skilled workman, and the 

 Museum apprentice rarely ever becomes a skilled workman, for his 

 whole time is taken up in examining the dried bodies of insects, so that 

 he has none to spai'e for the study of living insects. He may learn to 

 name specimens ; but when the naming is done, the real difificulties 

 begin, for then the insects have to be classified, and how can this be 

 done by a man with only a Museum training. The general characters 

 of the imago have been all that such have ever had to go upon, and 

 these alone, therefore, can by them be considered in deciding where 

 any given sj^ecies should be j^laced. Now such a method is at best but 

 a poor makeshift, and must lead to a vast amount of error ; and when 

 the later philosophy began to gain ground, and it was shown that the 

 general resemblance of many insects was due to outside forces and had 

 no real meaning in so far as structural relationship was concerned — 

 that colour as a character was unreliable because two specimens of the 

 same insect might be, the one white, the other black ; that the antennae 

 were untrustworthy because they varied in the sexes ; that the marking 

 varied endlessly in different individuals of the same species ; that even 

 the differences in leg structure, tufts of hairs, etc. were often but 

 secondary sexual characters, in fact, that the real relationshii) between 

 species was often obscured by dozens of matters of but little import in 

 classification — then it became clear that a system of classification based on 

 imaginal characters alone was necessarily a hotch-potch and not worthy 

 of the name of science. 



Our inability to prove some of the theories which have almost passed 

 into axioms of belief, removes entomology from among the number of 

 the exact sciences. We assume a sjjccial centre of creation for each 

 species, and cannot conceive any other reasonable explanation ; but yet, 

 the fact, that such a fundamental point has not been proved, is fatal to 

 the exactitude of the science we profess. Similar cases will occur to 

 many of you. But if, in its philoso})hical aspect, entomology may not 

 be considered an exact science, nevertheless, its philoso2)hical bases are 

 as sound as those of any other branch of biology, and in connection 

 with the soundness of the biological facts, I will say my last word on 

 classification. 



The object of classification is, to place together those species whicli 

 have most recently developed from the same stem, working back as far 

 as may be through the most recent stems to those less recent, and so 

 back to that from whence all have arisen. 



At present we see but darkly. We ourselves hardly know what we 

 want. We are like blind men gro}iing for tlie light. We do not really 

 know what are the essential characters in our insects which will enal)lo 

 us to trace l^ack their origin, and hence we move in mist, and only 

 emerge now and again from our confusion. But the physiologist and 

 embryologist have come to our aid, and we find that certain Inoail 

 axioms bold good through the various stages of development of all living 

 things. Biological students have formulated certain generalisations, 



