April, '09] JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC ENTOMOLOGY 105 



tention to the fact that this work has been, ahiiost without exception, 

 a labor of love, carried on by men with no thought of monetary 

 compensation, and in the midst of lives exceptionally greatly pre- 

 occupied with human affairs around them. They did their best, 

 considering the difficulties under which they were obliged to labor, 

 and the monuments to their self-sacrifice and zeal are not to be ruth- 

 lessly torn down and obliterated. But we shall here have a case 

 parallel with the old, low, weather-beaten, historic building giving 

 place to the modern structure of concrete and steel. You to whom 

 will fall the duty of this revision ^vill need to look well to it that 

 you leave these things more advanced than you found them. If I 

 mistake not the time will come when no one will be allowed to de- 

 scribe a new species or revise a group of old ones without being able 

 tp present also something in the way of descriptions and explana- 

 tions of the developmental stages or studies of habits, going to show, 

 beyond a reasonable doubt, that the forms with which he has dealt are 

 really what he represents them to be. So long as the science of 

 entomology consisted in the collection and arrangement of dried 

 corpses the system of classification in vogue w^as sufficient. But with 

 the new" era of entomological research, where insect binomics and 

 the interrelations of different species are more and more generally and 

 fully entered into, the structure is too frail and defective, so that al- 

 most as soon as we begin to build upon it we find it full of defects 

 and inevitably it must be discarded and reconstructed on a much 

 broader basis. These are problems that will be forced upon you and 

 which will not for a moment permit slovenly or inefficient work. 

 Please let me explain the use of this last sentence. In some quarters 

 university people seem to be confirmed in the opinion that a gradu- 

 ating student can only make himself and his alma mater famous 

 by describing something. It does not seem to matter much what, 

 but once he has done this he has almost smothered himself and his 

 university in a brain storm of glory ; sometimes to the discouragement 

 of the poor feUow, who, fortunately, is unable to comprehend the de- 

 sirability of such proceedings; and I hope to have said enough here 

 to sustain the latter in his stupidity. 



Some of you may wish to remind me that a few moments ago I 

 said something about the laws of priority. Only a single instance out 

 of many will be required to illustrate the point that was made. 

 Smerinthus geminatus, a common sphingid moth, was described by 

 Say in 1824. It is a common, somewhat variable, species, the specific 

 name, geminatvs, having reference to the two ocelli on each of the 

 posterior wings. In 1773 Drury described a single moth as from 



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